A year and a half after the massive Russian invasion, Ukrainians are still massively avoiding military service by paying for false statements from military doctors.
In his daily speech to the population denounced President Volodymyr Zelensky again on Wednesday night the bribery practices surrounding the military medical commissions, which are responsible for the examination of conscripts. According to Zelensky, it is “absolutely clear” that “corrupt decisions” are at the root of the large numbers of conscripts who have disappeared from military records on the basis of medical certificates.
Zelensky says that analyzes have shown that the number of rejected in some regions has increased tenfold since February last year, the month when Russian troops invaded Ukraine in large numbers. According to him, research shows that the amounts that conscripts pay for false medical certificates range from $ 3,000 to $ 15,000. According to Zelensky, “at least thousands” of Ukrainian conscripts have also traveled abroad on the basis of medical decisions. According to him, criminal investigations into corrupt practices at the military recruiting agencies are continuing.
Mass layoffs over corruption
At the beginning of August, Zelensky already fired all regional heads of the country’s military recruiting centers on suspicion of corruption. According to him, there are already more than a hundred criminal cases against military commissars. A criminal investigation was opened in the southern region of Odesa after a bribery scandal involving a military recruiting agency came to light earlier in the summer. “This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery in war is treason,” said Zelensky recently. He sees corruption in this time of war as a major threat to national security and an undermining of confidence in the government.
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Even before the large-scale Russian invasion, bribery and other corrupt practices were a major problem for Ukrainian government authorities. Zelensky won the 2019 presidential election on a pledge to fight widespread abuses. The eradication of corruption weighs heavily in possible admission to the European Union. In the short term, tackling the problem is important for receiving humanitarian, financial and military support from abroad. Several allies have expressed concerns about corruption over the past year and a half. Since February 2022, allies have already given military equipment and humanitarian aid worth many tens of billions of euros to Kyiv.
Cheating with government money
Those concerns abroad – and in Kyiv itself – are there for a reason. In January of this year, at least ten government officials were fired after a series of revelations about cheating with government money. One of the scandals involved the purchase of food for the Ukrainian armed forces. Published contracts showed that the prices of products for military units are two to three times lower than the prevailing Ukrainian market value. It killed, among others, the deputy defense minister Vyacheslav Shapovalov. That scandal dominated the international media at a time when President Zelensky was touring the world’s capitals trying to haul in Western main battle tanks, long-range missiles and other expensive military equipment.
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On top of that came another scandal, also directly related to the war. It turned out that Ukrainian ministers wrongly earned money from the purchase of generators from abroad. They were desperately needed across the country last winter because of the power outages caused by the ongoing Russian missile attacks on power plants. That corruption scandal led to the detention of the Deputy Minister for Infrastructure Development, Vasyl Lozynsky. He received 367,000 euros in bribes for the purchase of generators.
Vacation in Spain
Smaller matters also came to light. Thus, the deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, forced to quit after a journalistic publication revealed that he had used a Chevrolet Tahoe all-terrain vehicle supplied by the US for humanitarian aid along the front lines. And Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksi Symonenko was fired in January because in the middle of the war he and his family had gone on holiday to the Spanish resort of Marbella for ten days – despite a ban from President Zelensky due to the martial law in Ukraine.
Ukraine tied for 116th place in the annual 2022 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, along with El Salvador, Zambia, Algeria, Angola, Mongolia and the Philippines. In Europe, only Russia is considered an even more corrupt country than Ukraine; Russia ranks 137th. The index starts with Denmark as the world’s least corrupt country and ends with Somalia, ranked 180.