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Ukraine gets tough on medical exemptions from military duty
An estimated 70,000 soldiers have been killed in the conflict so far and Kyiv has stepped up its recruitment efforts
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Ukraine has clamped down on the number of medical exemptions it allows for men to avoid being called up to the army.
Kyiv will no longer permit conscripts with mild mental disorders, HIV+ status or hepatitis to skip military service.
The defence ministry issued the decree, first reported by the Ukrainian Military Pages on Sunday, after president Volodymyr Zelensky hit out at corruption in the exemption system.
Other conditions cut from the list include treatable tuberculosis, slow-progressing blood disease, and mild thyroid gland diseases.
Some 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the war so far and Kyiv has stepped up recruitment efforts as its army pushes for a decisive breakthrough on the southern front.
In August, Mr Zelensky sacked the heads of all enlistment offices after a series of corruption scandals, comparing their perceived “cynicism and bribery” to treason.
He last week announced a nationwide review of all medical exemptions issued since the start of the invasion.
A significant number of Ukrainian men are believed to have fled the country illegally since the start of the war, and the majority leader in parliament this week said Kyiv might resort to asking neighbouring countries to help bring them back.
But Fedor Venyslavsky, Mr Zelensky’s representative in parliament, on Tuesday rejected the idea, saying there are no legal grounds for a “large-scale extradition of citizens”.
Separately, Ukraine’s intelligence agency SBU said on Tuesday it foiled five separate criminal schemes in the country’s west to help draft-dodgers.
In the most elaborate of the five schemes, a criminal ring in the north-western city of Rivne set up a shell company that posed as an agricultural exporter. Draft-dodgers would then get exemptions to travel as the company’s managers, needing to go abroad for high-level talks about Ukrainian grain exports.
In Ternopil in the west, an employee of the local enlistment office charged young men the equivalent of £1,500 to avoid getting conscripted as he promised they would be formally enrolled in a college that offered exemptions.
In Ivano-Frankivsk, another western region, police arrested two local men who would shuttle draft-dodgers on all-terrain vehicles across the Carpathian mountains to Romania, bypassing border control.
The suspects face up to nine years in prison if convicted.