Draft evasion scandal could derail Ukraine’s war effort

This week, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin was forced to resign after accusations raised by the media, and then investigated by the Ukrainian intelligence service (SBU), that dozens of officials had evaded military service through fake medical certificates of disability. These were issued in return for bribes and one medical official was caught with around $450,000 in undeclared cash. This indicates serious official corruption, since those certificates certainly could not have been afforded on official salaries alone. As many as 64 members of medical commissions have been charged with falsification, and nine have already been convicted. More than 4,000 certificates of disability have been cancelled. In his address to the nation on the subject, Zelensky said that “it is not only prosecutors, by the way. There are hundreds of cases of obviously unjustified disability [certificates] among customs and tax officials, in the pension fund system, and in local administrations.”

In Russia, too, the mass evasion of military service through bribes to medical officials has been an open secret for decades. Poor conditions, official corruption, and horrifying levels of bullying (Dedovshchina) made joining the army bitterly unpopular among educated youth. An attempt at mass conscription in 2022 contributed to a sharp drop in public support for the war. Thereafter, the Russian government has largely dodged this problem by limiting conscription for active service, and omitting it altogether for the middle classes and inhabitants of the main cities.

Instead, Russia has relied with considerable success on volunteers from poorer and remote regions, who, like the conscripts on the front line, have been paid very high wages — in many cases, as much as five times the average wage in their localities. Russia also has far more manpower to draw upon: it is planning to increase its armed servicemen to 1.5 million by 2026, up from a million before the war, despite losing more than 100,000 soldiers in Ukraine.

Ukraine, however, is estimated to have lost around 80,000 soldiers and its population has declined by a quarter due to emigration to the West. Russia now has almost five times Ukraine’s population, so Kyiv therefore has to conscript every able-bodied man it can. Recruitment issues reflect wider problems of morale, with desertions from the Ukrainian military reported at above 50,000. To judge by reports from the front line, many of the new Ukrainian conscripts are poorly trained and unmotivated.

The corruption revealed by the latest scandal is being exploited by domestic political opponents of the Zelensky government, and will doubtless strengthen those forces in the West opposed to further aid for Ukraine. It is also of great potential importance for Ukraine’s postwar future. Bringing the country into the European Union will be a difficult process, and will meet fierce opposition from powerful European economic and political lobbies. Those factions will undoubtedly use corruption as an argument to block its accession.

Within Ukraine, as I found during a visit last year, elite corruption causes great anger among ordinary Ukrainians, and especially among veterans. When the soldiers come home from what they are likely to see as a lost war, and remembering their dead and disabled comrades, they are unlikely to take kindly to being ruled by the same corrupt elites, however “democratically elected”. There are ominous precedents for where this kind of feeling can lead.

Anatol Lieven is a former war correspondent and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC.