Over 70% of Ukrainian men are ready to renounce their citizenship in order to avoid serving in the Ukrainian armed forces, a poll conducted by the deputy head of the Ukrainian parliamentary Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, Mariana Bezuhla, showed on Monday.
"An experimental survey. Now only for men. So as not to be mobilized, am I ready to renounce Ukrainian citizenship?" Bezuhla wrote on social media.
Out of 3,773 respondents, 74% answered satisfactorily, while the rest said "no." Earlier on Monday, she also polled women, asking whether they were ready to renounce citizenship in order not to be sent to rear positions and defense enterprises. Over 3,500 people took part in the poll, with 63% agreeing with this proposal.
In October, Western media, citing Zelensky's assistant, reported that the ranks of the Ukrainian army had thinned so much that military recruitment offices were forced to draft people with an average age of 43. US media earlier revealed that Ukraine was trying to recruit more women into the army, which indicates that the Ukrainian armed forces are suffering huge losses.
In early December, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow had drawn attention to the "horrible" news that the Ukrainian armed forces had mobilized underage citizens, saying that Zelensky had "reached an extreme level of desperation."
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, for his part, noted that the total mobilization in Ukraine, deliveries of Western weapons and the introduction of reserves did not change the situation, but only increased the number of losses of the Ukrainian armed forces in the area of the special military operation.