Ukraine wants to urge refugee conscripts to return home

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Ukraine stops issuing passports to men aged 18 to 60 living abroad. A regulation published on the government’s official online portal on Wednesday said that sending passports to Ukrainian diplomatic missions abroad will “no longer be practiced.” This means that Ukrainian men of military age will only be able to obtain their passports in the country in the future.

The measure is part of the Ukrainian government’s efforts to encourage men to return to their home country. On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry in Kiev announced the temporary suspension of consular services for male Ukrainians living abroad between the ages of 18 and 60 – with the exception of the issuance of identity cards for returning to Ukraine.

At the beginning of April, the parliament in Kiev passed a controversial law on the mobilization of soldiers.

April 11, 2024 | 03:15 minutes

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Tuesday in the online service X:

Shortly after the adoption of a new, stricter mobilization law, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry ordered a halt to consular services for conscript men who had fled abroad.

“If these people think that someone is fighting on the front far away and sacrificing their life for this state and someone else is sitting abroad receiving services from this state, that doesn’t work,” Kuleba said.

After the point about mobilization in the law became known, long lines of men formed in front of Ukrainian consulates in the main refugee countries in the European Union. They wanted to apply for new passports before it came into force.

How is the recruitment project received by the population? ZDF correspondent Henner Hebestreit reports.

April 11, 2024 | 01:14 minutes

On Wednesday, hundreds of Ukrainians protested in front of a passport issuing office in the Polish capital Warsaw because their documents were not handed over to them. Officials justified the stop with “technical problems.” The Ukrainian ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Swarich, assured the AFP news agency that all applications for travel documents submitted before April 23 would be processed.

Ukraine has been fending off Russian invasion for over two years. With the introduction of martial law, conscripts were banned from leaving the country, with a few exceptions. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have fled abroad with forged documents or across the green border to avoid military service.

According to Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, his office is already looking for hundreds of thousands of people who have ignored draft notices and summonses. The army has recently had great difficulty recruiting new soldiers.

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