Bill is aimed at conscripting hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but exact figure has not been spelled out.
Ukraine’s parliament has passed a mobilisation
bill aimed at conscripting hundreds of thousands of reinforcements,
after a lengthy and contentious process to determine who next will be
pressed into service.
The numbers needed are
lower than the 500,000 initially sought, though the exact figure has not
been spelled out. Many will be 25- and 26-year-old men, eligible for
enforced enlistment for the first time.
A
demobilisation clause that would have allowed soldiers to leave the
military after 36 months of service was excluded after pressure from
Ukrainian commanders concerned about the impact as the war heads towards
the three-year mark.
MPs rejected an initial
version of the bill in January and a revised version was submitted in
February. It attracted 4,000 amendments in a contentious debate that
finally ended on Thursday as it passed its second reading.
Some
key provisions have already been signed into law by the president,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, separately this month, including a provision to lower the minimum age for male military conscription from 27 to 25.
Younger
men from the age of 18 will be able to volunteer for the military as
before but cannot be pressed into frontline service, while the maximum
age of 60 remains unchanged.
Ukraine needs
fresh recruits to hold thinning frontlines and to rotate combat veterans
from the battlefield as it deals with growing casualties and fresh
Russian offensives along the eastern front. But those who were keenest
to volunteer are likely to have signed up a long time ago.
Russia
continued its bombing campaign overnight, focused on power stations and
other parts of Ukraine’s energy grid. The Kharkiv region was struck at
least 10 times, leaving 200,000 homes without power in the morning, and
the city metro had to be halted. Four people were killed in bombing in
Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian
energy company Centerenergo said a power plant in Trypilska, in the Kyiv
region, was destroyed. “All the workers who were on shift during the
shelling are alive,” said Andriy Hota, the Centerenergo head, but the
site was said to have lost all of its generating capacity.
In
December, Zelenskiy said the former commander-in-chief Valerii
Zaluzhnyi had requested 450,000 to 500,000 new recruits, but last month
Zaluzhnyi’s replacement, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said that figure had been
“significantly reduced”. The precise number required was not specified.
A
fresh row broke out on Wednesday after the demobilisation clause was
dropped. A leaked letter from Syrskyi to the defence secretary, Rustem
Umerov, said the issue should be discussed in a future bill, reflecting
concern that tens of thousands could become eligible from February next
year.
Dmytro Lazutkin, a spokesperson for
Ukraine’s defence ministry, said on Wednesday that “currently it is
impossible to weaken the defence forces” while the fighting continued.
“We cannot make hasty decisions now,” he said.
The
defence ministry said relieving soldiers was an issue. “It is clear
that people who have been fighting since the beginning and holding the
defence since 2022 are getting tired and exhausted,” Lazutkin said.
Some
soldiers complained about the new provisions. “It’s a disaster,”
Oleksandr, 46, an artilleryman in the Donetsk region, told the AFP news
agency. “When a person knows when he is going to be demobilised he will
have a different attitude,” he said. “If a person is like a slave then
it will not lead to anything good.”
The bill
includes mandatory medical checks for those who held the now scrapped
“partially eligible” status to see if they are fit to serve. In future,
those mobilised will be deemed either eligible or ineligible on health
grounds.
Now that it has been passed by the
parliament, the mobilisation bill has to be approved by the speaker and
signed into law by Zelenskiy. It is expected to become law next month.
Russia
has been quietly mobilising fresh recruits during 2023 and 2024, though
the figures officially released are likely to be exaggerations.
Vladimir Putin said at the end of 2023 that 486,000 new recruits had
joined the army that year and that 1,500 a day were signing contracts.
On Tuesday, Russia’s defence ministry claimed another 100,000 recruits
had joined the army so far in 2024.
(Article by Dan Sabbagh and Artem Mazhulin in Kyiv republished from theguardian.com)
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Author: Planet Today
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