A man in Odesa, Ukraine in this July 2022 image used for illustration purposes only.
David Goldman/AP Photo
Ukraine is facing increasing difficulties with military recruitment, with some avoiding the draft.
One man paid $5,000 for a spine diagnosis, allowing him to leave the country, The Guardian reported.
It comes amid a crackdown aimed at corrupt officials who Zelenskyy says are aiding draft dodgers.
A Ukrainian citizen eligible for the draft slipped out of the country after paying $5,000 for a medical diagnosis exempting him from serving in the military, according to a new report that highlights the country’s increasing recruitment difficulties.
The man, identified only as a 39-year-old from Odesa in the south of Ukraine, told The Guardian that in April he paid a fixer to arrange for a nearby hospital to diagnose him as having a severe spinal injury.
“Everyone knows where to find them,” the man told the newspaper.
“They sent me to a hospital to do a spinal MRI,” he continued. “The hospital gave me a medical report claiming I had a major spinal defect, and with that I could get papers allowing me to leave the country.”
“I had the feeling that, at every stage of the way, people knew what was happening and were getting a cut,” he added.
Two weeks later, the man had left and is now living elsewhere in Europe, the paper reported.
The report comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads up an anti-corruption purge in his country, firing all regional military committee heads and accusing them of taking bribes and helping eligible citizens to flee the country.
“This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is high treason,” he said, per the BBC’s translation.
Ukraine amended its conscription laws in January 2023 in an effort to close recruitment loopholes, as the Kyiv Post reported. At present, most physically fit men aged 18-60 are eligible, with some exemptions for disability and critical jobs, per the outlet.
But a year and a half into Russia’s grueling invasion, the ongoing crackdown illustrates a pressing recruitment problem for Ukraine.
Some young men have spent thousands of dollars to flee the country, or hide from authorities to avoid being drafted, The Wall Street Journal reported in March.
Thousands of people who volunteered to fight at the outset of the invasion in February 2022 have been injured and killed, leaving a much more reluctant body of potential fighters in Ukraine, the report said.
Russia also faces marked public resistance to conscription measures.
President Vladimir Putin’s deeply unpopular partial mobilization announced in September last year highlighted one of his few domestic political weaknesses among a population that increasingly prefers to think of the war as far away from their lives.
Nonetheless, Russia’s population is more than triple Ukraine’s, and Putin has turned to increasing the age of military eligibility, in what one expert told Insider is a means of bringing more people to the battlefield without another mass mobilization.
More broadly, corruption in Ukraine has long been considered one of the country’s most endemic problems.
The DC-based nonprofit Freedom House ranked Ukraine as a “transitional or hybrid regime” in a 2023 profile, adding that corruption has continued into wartime and is rising as an urgent issue in public opinion surveys.