“Finally it worked! I was in favor of it a long time ago, because it is a shame to mobilize children,” lawmaker Oleksij Hončarenko wrote on the Telegram social network. At the same time, he stated that he will fight for the demobilization of men who are in this age category, but have already been called up to the army.
Ukraine has been defending itself against Russian armed aggression since February 2022, and insufficient numbers of soldiers are one of the reasons for the current slow progress of the invading army in the east of the defending country.
After the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, the authorities mobilized men subject to military service between the ages of 27 and 60. The younger ones could decide to join the army voluntarily, and many of them took advantage of that.
In the spring of this year, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, signed an amendment that lowered the minimum age limit for mobilization to 25 years.
At the same time, however, another law entered into force, which abolished restrictions on eligibility to serve in the army. Conscription thus paradoxically began to apply only to those Ukrainians under the age of 25 who, due to health problems, had by then been recognized as unfit for military service in the war. The new law is supposed to eliminate this legal problem, wrote the server RBK-Ukraine.
Estimates speak of high losses on both sides of the front, but neither side discloses its military losses. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” in the fall of 2022, but hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country to foreign countries out of fear of being drafted into the war. Since then, the authorities have been supplementing the units with volunteers, who entice them with rewards, or convicts, whom they promise pardon after six months of warfare.
