Ukraine launched a recruitment campaign for the army | iRADIO

Ukrainians can find moderate recruitment on job sites or in information centers, on billboards and social networks. It offers them a novelty in times of war: the possibility of choice. Candidates can choose a specific unit and position that will match their skills. They also have a choice of how long they will serve.

In the streets of the cities, soldiers look down on Ukrainians from billboards, urging them to join the defense of the homeland. For convenience, the slogans are supplemented with QR codes.

In a video campaign on the Internet, the 93rd Mechanized Brigade assures its fellow citizens that “everyone can do it.” The images show cooks or tractor drivers who are assigned to similar positions in the army – field cooks and tank drivers.

Ukrainian military experts realize that in a democratic country, the element of choice can be key to luring people into the military, said Natalija Kalmykova, deputy defense minister.

“The people who are supposed to defend our country now would not have chosen an army career: they are civilians,”said the deputy. “And civilians are used to having a choice,”she added.

Kiev desperately needs to replenish its exhausted troops, which, at the beginning of the third year of the war, are outnumbered and materially outnumbered by Russia along the thousand-kilometer front.

The initial patriotic influx of volunteers who volunteered to join the army after the Russian invasion in February 2022 has dried up. The Ukrainian government admits its recruitment campaign has hit obstacles. Thousands of people are avoiding the draft, some of them trying to flee abroad rather than risk a life in the trenches.

The mobilization law, which will come into force in Ukraine in May, requires men in office to update their conscription information. However, after public outcry, severe penalties for those who evade the draft disappeared from the proposal.

Thirteen new recruitment centers have opened in the country since mid-February, with the Ukrainian government planning to increase the number to 30 by the middle of this year, says Oleksiy Bezhevets, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry who oversees recruitment.

300 people per month

About 300 people visited the first center in Lviv during the first month of operation, Beževec said, without specifying whether any of them were recruited. He admitted that this plan was not for the military “a miracle pill“, although he says the spectrum of positions to be filled is so wide that it doesn’t matter what people choose.

“The main goal is to give people the opportunity to overcome their fear and enter the military sphere,”said Beževec.

Although the recruitment campaign is a positive solution for the Ukrainian army, it is not decisive for the serious shortage of soldiers. Only full mobilization will help with this, believes military expert Michael Kofman from the Carnegie Institute of Washington.

“(Ukraine) probably needs hundreds of thousands of men to sustain itself on the battlefield – especially the infantry, for which few are likely to volunteer, as it is the most likely to suffer losses of the fighting forces,”stated Kogman.

Ukraine’s military effort, launched after the invasion, has been hampered by local media reports of corruption and administrative incompetence by the authorities. Social media has been flooded with videos of police taking men off the streets or breaking into homes.

According to a February survey by Kyiv-based research agency Info Sapiens for texty.org, common concerns about military service include insufficient training, bad commanders and the fact that the length of service is not limited. In a survey of 400 men of draft age, only 35 percent said they were ready to serve if called up.

“Somewhere, at some stage, trust was lost,”said Bezevec. “Right now our job is to restore it,”he added.

CTK

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