Germany Discusses Sending Ukrainian Men Back as Kyiv Needs More Soldiers

BERLIN, GERMANY - 2024/02/24: Protesters draped in Ukrainians flags take part during the r
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Oliver JJ Lane

Germany’s newspaper of record postulates whether Ukrainian men of military age should be encouraged or forced to go home and fight as Kyiv struggles to build an army big enough to throw back the Russian invasion.

“The Ukrainian army urgently needs new soldiers”, notes Die Welt — the broadsheet The Times analogue founded by British occupying forces after the Second World War to give Germany a highbrow quality paper in the wake of Nazi-era publications being shut down — before examining the number of military-age Ukrainian males who fled the country in the early days of the war and what could be done with them.

Ukraine for its own part has said it needs half a million extra soldiers on top of the nearly one million presently serving, a major increase by any standard.

Given the clandestine nature of the act, knowing exactly how many Ukrainian men fled military service after Russia’s second invasion in 2022 is difficult. Kyiv has been prosecuting a network of over 100 military recruitment officers who are alleged to have sold exemption papers for big cash or cryptocurrency payoffs, and data reported last year stated 20,000 Ukrainian men fleeing conscription were detected crossing illegally into European border states in 2022.

Between legitimate reasons to break Ukraine’s wartime state of martial law to leave the country as an adult male of military age, those fleeing conscription, and other cases Welt reports there are 159,512 men aged between 27 and 60 presently in Germany. If President Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan to push the conscription age downward to 25 went through, that number would rise to 167,854 of-age men in Germany, they said.

While the numbers involved are large, they are dwarfed by the overall number of Ukrainians in Germany, who are typically women, children, and the elderly, and who number some million-and-a-quarter people. In all of the European Union and the United Kingdom, there are nearly four and a half million Ukrainians on refugee papers.

Among the options for getting Ukrainians back to Ukraine, the report noted, was Germany removing asylum status, cutting off the benefits paid to military-age Ukrainian men while they live in Germany, and the Ukrainian government sanctioning its own citizens, freezing their bank accounts back home.

Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Oleksiy Honcharenko has suggested Kyiv should even ask its partner nations in Europe to proactively withdraw benefits payments to relevant Ukrainian men as a means to encourage them to return home. While German politicians have previously discussed withdrawing benefit payments from the nearly 100,000 Ukrainian men in that age bracket living in the country, the handouts are guaranteed by the German constitution.

Ukraine has already discussed sanctions on its own citizens not serving when called, including freezing bank accounts and assets and banning individuals from operating a car. These plans have proven controversial, with government-supporting MPs calling them “categorically unacceptable”, and Welt notes such punitive measures could only be pushed through at a cost to Zelensky’s popularity at home.

There is also the question of what such moves would mean for Germany’s asylum system. Europe has taken in hundreds of thousands if not millions of ‘asylum seekers’ in recent years who claim to be on the move to flee conflict, in many cases citing a danger of being forced to fight at home. As much as Germany may wish to see its Ukrainian male population to go and fight the war it strongly supports, this may be too much of a bridge to cross.

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