Ukraine denying passport renewals to replenish troops
KYIV, Ukraine — Even as Ukraine works to get muchneeded arms from a huge U.S. aid package to the front line, its government is seeking to reverse the drain of its potential soldiers, announcing that men of conscription age will no longer be able to renew passports from outside Ukraine.
The Cabinet of Ministers said late Wednesday that men between 18 and 60 years old who are deemed fit for military service will only be able to replace their passports inside Ukraine.
Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, mostly to neighboring European countries. The European Union’s statistics agency, Eurostat, says 4.3 million Ukrainians are living in EU countries, 860,000 of them men 18 years of age or older.
The defense minister of Poland, home to one of the biggest Ukrainian diasporas, said the country was ready to help “in ensuring that those who are subject to compulsory military service go to Ukraine,” though he did not specify how.
Wladyslaw KosiniakKamysz said “Ukrainian citizens have obligations towards the state.”
The move has met with some criticism inside Ukraine. Opposition lawmaker Ivanna KlympushTsyntsadze, who heads the Parliamentary Committee for Ukraine’s European Integration, said denying military-age men access to consular services could lead to “well-founded” legal challenges at the European Court of Human Rights.
“I think that these actions will only push an enormous number of Ukrainians to look for different ways to obtain citizenship from other countries,” she said.
Russia’s population of almost 150 million dwarfs Ukraine’s 38 million, and Moscow can draw on a much bigger army. Earlier this month, Ukraine lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25 in an effort to bolster the size of its military.
Oleksandr Pavlichenko, executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, said the measure was a violation of individual rights — and also unlikely to succeed in getting Ukrainian men to return home from abroad.