Row escalates while Russia holds upper hand on the battlefield.
April 25, 2024 1:57 pm CET
KYIV — Domestic criticism of Ukraine’s government is mounting over a controversial temporary ban on issuing new passports and delivering nonemergency consular services for Ukrainian men of fighting age abroad.
“It is a blatantly illegal and [an] extremely harmful step,” said Volodymyr Viatrovych, an lawmaker from the opposition European Solidarity Party. “Obviously, the government wants to force Ukrainians to return to Ukraine as soon as possible. However, the result will be exactly the opposite.”
New mobilization requirements which force all men of fighting age to register or renew their personal information with Ukrainian conscription offices no matter where they live have stirred up unrest, at a time when Ukraine is struggling to resist Russia’s all-out war on the battlefield.
Many Ukrainian men who had been living abroad with their families for years before the full-scale invasion started were outraged, as they were not planning to return to fight, but have been actively helping with donations and advocating for more aid to Ukraine. At the same time, acting servicemen — many of whom have been fighting on the front lines for more than two years without rest — are unhappy that the new mobilization law features no terms of demobilization.
According to its many critics, the new decree about consular services violates human rights and will only alienate Ukrainians living abroad. But President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government thinks the decision is fair.
“A man of conscription age went abroad, showed his state that he does not care about its survival, and then comes and wants to receive services from this state. It does not work this way. Our country is at war,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said earlier this week.
“If anyone believes that while someone is fighting far away at the front line and risking his or her life for this state, someone else is staying abroad but receiving services from this state, then this is not how it works,” Kuleba said. “Staying abroad does not relieve a citizen of his or her duties to the homeland.”
The ban will last from April 23 until May 18 when the mobilization law adopted recently by the Ukrainian parliament comes into force. Ukraine has had to increase mobilization to be able to replenish battlefield losses and rotate out exhausted troops fighting the Russian invasion.
To do that, the government decreased the conscription age, ramped up punishments for draft dodgers and obliged Ukrainian men abroad to renew their data in conscription offices. But, according to Viatrovych, the mechanism of how they will do that has still not been created.
Ukrainians who do not want to serve in the army will still not come back to register for the draft because of the ban, but they can lose legal status abroad, said Oleksandr Pavlichenko, acting head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.
“In some countries, Ukrainians will begin to lose their legal status as persons under protection. They will have to apply for refugee status,” Pavlichenko said. According to European estimates, some 600,000 to 850,000 Ukrainian men fled to the European Union after the Russian assault began in 2022.
The new consular services decision sparked outrage among them.
“I legally left Ukraine. And I am against the fact that the government sees us all as draft dodgers. I will renew my information with the conscription office when the time comes, until then, give me my passport,” a man named Maksym told the BBC.
However, Ukrainian soldiers, many of whom have been fighting for more than two years without any prospect of demobilization, supported the government.
“No one had been talking about justice for servicemen in our country for a long time. But here it is, at least some small percentage of it,” Ukrainian military medic Alina Mykhailova said in a post on Facebook. “No one sent us there either, but for some reason, we are there. If you don’t like it, give up your citizenship and go to hell.”