Ukrainian draft dodgers "dream up extreme ways" to avoid the frontline as the country is struggling to tackle low morale in the army, a UK newspaper has reported.
As an example, the newspaper referenced a 20-year-old injured Ukrainian soldier, who now says he will never come back to the frontline, not least due to his commanders'
indifferent attitude toward him.
The soldier, who is mentioned only by his first name, Andrey, deserted from his unit after he was discharged from hospital with bullet fragments in his left shoulder and ordered to return to the front, according to the media outlet. Currently, he remains in his refuge in the western Ukrainian city of Lvov.
He added that he now asks himself why he should "go back to be meat in a trench after seeing so much corruption and
incompetence involved in the system" that paid no attention to him or his wounds.
Andrey also said that he was especially frustrated over the corrupted way he was handled by a Ukrainian military medical commission.
Andrey added that at the end of the day, he was ordered
to return to his combat unit on the frontline in Donbass because the authorities did not consider him to be sufficiently wounded to warrant a discharge, nor deserve fully-fledged surgery abroad.
According to him, after he asked his battalion commander for help, the commander told him to f*** off and not to bother him about his injuries.
His story comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had to sack all the heads of the regional
mobilization offices following a corruption scandal in which military medical commissions, which assess the fitness of mobilized men for active service, were involved.
In this vein, anti-corruption activists pointed to the case of Yevgeny Borisov, the former head of Odessa's regional military mobilization office, who is accused of acquiring illegal payoffs totaling $5 million in exchange for issuing the so-called "white ticket" exemptions from service for soldiers or unwilling draftees.
According to the activists, 50,000 such tickets were issued by commissions under Borisov’s jurisdiction. They pointed out that the price for an illegal "white ticket" to escape mobilization was around $7,000 to $8,000, and that since the authorities started to crack down, the price tag had soared to about $20,000.
Ukrainian media meanwhile reports that the number of those in Ukraine who are trying to avoid draft or mobilization is on the increase, a trend that comes amid Kiev’s botched
counteroffensive, which has already claimed the lives of more than 71,000 soldiers.