Season 2 Episode 8

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Francis Farrell

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski.

Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

This week, we're taking a look at one of the most fundamental things that Ukraine needs to continue its war effort, people fighting on the front lines because the issue of mobilisation is causing debate and consternation in the Ukrainian government and in Ukrainian society.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the world was astonished to see these lines of Ukrainian men at the border returning from life and work abroad ready to serve their country.

But after two years of ferocious fighting and horrendous losses on both sides, both Russia and Ukraine are suffering shortages of manpower. Russia has filled the void with immigrants, convicts, factory workers, all press ganged into serving the Russian Army. They've even forcibly mobilised Ukrainians living on occupied territories.

Ukraine initially relied significantly on volunteers and has gradually mobilised people throughout the period of the war. But readiness to serve is not a binary. It falls on a spectrum, and the people most inclined to fight are now becoming scarce. Actually, they need to be rotated out.

People are also much more conscious of just how brutal the fighting is, and are much more reticent as a result, especially of being sent to the hotspots where shelling and living in trenches are a daily reality.

The current mobilisation is failing to deliver the numbers that Kyiv needs as we shift towards a long war, hence the new drive, up to half a million new recruits and new legislation to make that happen.

But that raises very difficult questions. Specifically, who should be called up first? At its most cynical, Ukrainian society is now asking itself, who are we ready to sacrifice for the survival of the rest?

To learn more about this issue, I'll be speaking to Francis Farrell, the Kyiv Independent war correspondent. Before joining us, he was the managing editor at the online media project, Lossi 36, and a freelance journalist and documentary photographer.

Over the past two years, Francis has been travelling across the country to its front lines, meeting all kinds of people who have been mobilised. So, he has a real on the ground view of how this is affecting all sorts of Ukrainians.

Hi Francis. Welcome to Power Lines.

Francis: Hi Jakub. It's great to be here.

Jakub: We are speaking on Wednesday, January 10th, and last week on January 4th, the Ukrainian government proposed changes to the rules on mobilisation that would have a dramatic impact on who is called up to the front lines.

Can you give us an outline of what this new proposed law looks like and how it has been received by Ukrainians.

Francis: Yeah, so the first murmur that we heard that this was likely on horizon was actually during Zelenskyy’s press conference. I think it was actually the very first question that he answered on the 19th of December when he basically made a claim that the military has requested the mobilisation of about 450 to 500,000 new soldiers for the next year.

And so, there's that basic need. Later Zaluzhnyi in his own press conference, which was a week after the initial draft law was proposed by the cabinet of ministers, said that there wasn't such a specific request, but still this draft law did get proposed.

And it's worth remembering that Ukrainian military is now a majority mobilised military. In a similar way to Russia, although it's just not worth pretending that it's all patriotic guys who went to volunteer from the start.

So, there are already many, many mobilised troops in the Ukrainian military, but since people don't really go to volunteer anymore, there is this huge need for more people.

So, what the draft law is about, and as you mentioned, it could change a lot. We can talk about the status of it at the moment, but what the draft law is about is about widening the scope of people who can be mobilised, introducing more serious consequences for those who try and evade it.

And overall, just streamlining the process, basically giving the government and the military, the defence ministry the muscle it needs to get these larger numbers of people for the military, which is just again, absolutely a necessity.

So, if we can talk about some of the details, like how they imagine actually doing this. Again, this is the draft law. So, a lot of this is very controversial and still might not make it into the final agreement, but we're talking about the conscription age reduced from 27 to 25.

For example, there's talk about introducing electronic conscription system through the same really innovative electronic government services program that Ukraine has talking about potentially putting basically those who are fine to evade service basically in a similar legal position.

And they're still being debated by these committees and will be debated in parliament as well.

And the other thing is the idea of potentially seeing an end date, which is kind of counterintuitive to the need to just get more people into the army, but I think the leadership finally understands that the social problems, which will be inevitably caused by this, could be alleviated to a great extent by having just the idea of an end date so that you can be discharged.

People are discussing whether it should be 36 months or three years or a year and a half or something in between. So, people who could be mobilised don't necessarily see it, “Well, oh that's it, I'm probably not coming out of this alive. There's a specific end date when I can come back home to my family.”

Jakub: So, a lot to unpack there. I think maybe just coming back to some of the changes in terms of how rigorous the proposed mobilisation law looks like right now. So, you mentioned sort of this loss of access to local services, basically if you're on the debtor's list, if I understand correctly, under the new law.

And again, this is the proposal, it might change quite a bit and I think we should unpack the direction that it's moving in a little bit later.

I've heard that there's consideration about potentially even losing access to bank accounts, no longer being able to leverage various government services. So, that seems rather draconian what has been the response.

Francis: So, undoubtedly this is the kind of one of the biggest issues so far in this year, of course, that all Ukrainians are talking about. And it's very sensitive because people are talking about this being draconian or this being potentially a violation of constitutional rights of Ukrainian citizens.

But at the same time, you can't really come out against the idea of the need to mobilise more people in general because that is just objective for Ukraine's survival.

And so, people are discussing it in this kind of tense way. But part of what makes this so kind of controversial for the population is, and we can talk more about this later, but it's about how not only the legal kind of framework within which mobilisation would be carried out.

But also, the actual way it's carried out in practice by the recruiting officers who have this very already dirty reputation for A, a lot of corruption and B, quite rough practices, heavy handed practices of packing people away into buses from the street or raiding gyms because that's where all the young fit men are hanging out.

Jakub: Yeah, I've heard reports that recruitment officers are hanging out near sport clubs, gyms, all that, especially across the mid-sized cities of Ukraine.

Francis: Yeah, just a kind of interesting, funny example. Between Christmas and New Year, I was in Drahobrat skiing for the first time in three years. It's a cheaper ski resort. It's quite Soviet and chaotic in many ways.

And then the day after I left, there was all this social media chatter about these recruiting officers who had showed up at the ski resort. So, there were pictures posted on social media of them walking around in uniform, even with their rifles.

It was just an interesting kind of prism in which to look at the society's reaction to this in the comments of these posts on social media because you had some people very angry saying, “This is going too far. This is just a place where young people want to rest and relax in the holidays after the hard years we've all had, and now they need to be afraid of recruitment officers.”

And then you have other people who might be saying, “Well, I mean, it's what we need. I mean, no one should be safe, privileged people who are out there skiing shouldn't think that they won't be sent to war.”

And then you have some soldiers saying, “Yeah, that's what we like to see. If they're young, if they're doing sport, then they should go to the army.”

And then you have other people who are saying, “Well, why aren't they in Bukovel? Because Bukovel is the much posher, fancier ski resort in Ukraine, very kind of European standards and known to be a popular hangout place for the elite of the country.”

And it's like, “Well, why aren't we seeing the recruitment guys in Bukovel? Drahobrat is more of a people's resort.”

So, you can just see all of this very complicated social kind of murmurings and emotions concerning this. But it's something we'll see a lot more of in the next months, I'm sure.

Jakub: So, there's obviously a huge political dimension to this. One thing, as you mentioned with the press conferences of Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi, Zelenskyy came out with a specific number of 450, 000 to half a million. Zaluzhnyi kind of said that he didn't want to say anything specific.

But my understanding was that everyone came out with the feeling that the number's probably around there, he just doesn't want to disclose it for sort of military confidence reasons.

Given that they both came out talking about mobilisation, is that a sign that there is an alignment between the two? Over the past weeks especially, we've had rising reports about the tensions between Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi.

Do you feel like them coming out and both talking about mobilisation, a politically painful issue, is a sign that things between them are cooling off or that they've got a better working relationship?

Francis: It's a really tricky one. At Zaluzhnyi’s press conference, I was very happy to see the defence minister Rustem Umerov, who was appointed not too long ago.

And my personal impression was that they had a very cordial relationship. They were kind of smiling and joking around a bit. And that gave me hope that when it comes to this need for the military high command and the civilian government of Ukraine to cooperate on some of the most challenging things like mobilisation, for example, it gave me hope there.

With Zelenskyy, unfortunately, I think it's not that simple. It's hard to say if this is a cooling off, I think everyone would really hope for them to just be able to sit down and work together in the most effective way possible.

But just overall, the feeling from Zelenskyy’s press conference was, he was kind of questioning his own military with the figure of 450 to 500,000. He was saying, I'm not sure if that's a fair number, if that's a just number. I haven't been given enough real evidence that why we need that many people exactly.

And then he went on onto another thing about wanting to kind of stand up for civilians and defend civilians a bit, because civilians can be a bit maligned by some people, by the military, for example, for not doing enough and saying, you need six civilians to fund one serviceman in the military and saying these things.

So, there is an argument to be made there that basically Zelenskyy understands that the social backlash caused by expanding this mobilisation and kind of getting more tough with it is eventually going to come back at him. Because everything leads to him at the end of the day. He's the supreme commander in chief and the president of the country.

It seemed like he was trying to kind of position himself in a way that this is what the military being his perceived rival, like Zaluzhnyi, this is what they want. They want to drag so many of you off to the war, and I'm trying my best to make sure it's as fair as possible. And to kind of go easy on the civilians a little bit.

Because unfortunately this all is happening in the context of an objective understanding that politics has returned to the country. Thankfully, everyone's understood that elections are impossible, but political competition, jostling kind of perception of who is becoming more popular is definitely back.

And there are polls with trust ratings coming out and people are looking at them and unfortunately, this is happening.

Jakub: So, this is the definition of sort of a political hot potato. It's obviously a difficult decision to make, but one that is necessary for the country. I think we should get into why that's necessary in a little bit.

But as you mentioned, politics is coming back to Ukraine. There have been rival or alternative mobilisation legislation submitted over the past week.

There's been various opponents of the ruling Sluha Narodu Party that have voiced either various populous messages or have used the mobilisation laws to criticise the government. What's your take on what is happening on the political field and how mobilisation is being used?

Francis: I think at the moment what we can see is that, yeah, it's a very strange, blurred lines or maybe a Venn diagram of sorts between what is making the right decisions for the country and what is playing politics.

I think lots of people have raised concerns with different aspects of the draft law. You had one committee saying that the whole equivalence of draft dodgers and debtors is just not really properly legal, that we had the ombudsman talking about dangers to constitutional human rights.

And then you have a lot of more kind of rational concerns about, for example, a certain disability group now becoming eligible for the draft.

And then there's the whole idea of people of some of the aspects of the draft law basically allowing for corruption in the recruiting officers and that kind of thing.

So, at this point, things are moving so fast and it's a bit hard to judge exactly where we stand. I do think it's pretty much a fair argument to make that a lot of the opposition people who've come out with concerns about some aspects of the law, whether it be the electronic drafts, notices or the disability groups or the thing about the end date of service. There's definitely some politics being played there.

No one's going to take the mantle of being like, “No, I want all this to stop. I'm going to be representing the demographic that is against this kind of populous thing of, no, we shouldn't take our men off to war anymore,” or something like that.

Because in terms of the country being on a war footing and needing to mobilise, that's still a consensus agreement. But it's in the little things where some opposition members are looking to perhaps play some politics.

Jakub: Yeah. So, let's take a step back to why we're talking about mobilisation in the first place. So, first of all, this number of half a million, let's say, what does that tell you about where Ukraine is in terms of its military situation and its strategy going forward?

Francis: So, half a million over the next year, the number in itself is pretty vague because it's difficult to predict in any ways what the dynamics will be of the war in the future.

We're talking about now we're talking about Ukraine almost certainly being in a state of strategic defence for at least the first months of 2024, and at least probably the first half of 2024, unless something drastic and unexpected happens.

And so, that differs very much from a year ago, for example, where we knew that the primary goal of the Ukrainian military was building new brigades, specifically for offensive operations.

Now at this point, we hear all the time from the military that the brigades are on demand, and that casualties, which Ukrainian units are of course suffering at different rates are not being replenished.

And when they are, unfortunately, because a lot of these brigades who have been through the thick of it are those with a lot of volunteer soldiers.

Now, unfortunately, I heard from a friend in the 47th Brigade who is fighting near Avdiivka, and their story is crazy because they were brought in volunteers to lead the counteroffensive, and after that kind of petered out, they were sent straight to the hottest part of the Avdiivka frontline to defend there.

And so, a brigade like the 47th is just ultimately going to take a lot of losses, and that needs to be replenished, but it can't be replenished by volunteers anymore.

So, those are some of the basic needs. There's replenishing units that have taken casualties. We don't know about the plans whether Ukraine wants to still create more new brigades.

So, I think the consensus is that we don't need more of those to start from scratch, but it's about maintaining at least some base level of fighting effectiveness for the brigades that are already fighting and already deployed.

And then on top of that, you have question of perhaps eventually replacing people and letting people be discharged. And so, that's another aspect where we really don't know where it could have a huge effect on this figure of how many people need to be mobilised.

Because if you operate in one paradigm where service is still indefinite until the end of the war and the end of martial law, that's one quantity of soldiers that you'll need to mobilise.

But if you operate in a different paradigm where now finally the government is getting serious about offering soldiers an end point to their service, then those people need to be replaced.

And that just causes so many headaches already for the command who is trying to maintain the fighting effectiveness of their military. But at the same time, the objective need, and I think most people would agree, the right of these people who've fought for so long defending their country to eventually be discharged is also totally legitimate.

So, we'll see with this draft law, if we reach a point where they'll agree on some kind of end date to service, and that in turn could retroactively affect the number of people that need to be mobilised.

Jakub: For the people who are serving currently, is it the most common situation that if somebody enrolled at the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, are most of those people still serving? Has there been any rotation at all for the people who signed up in February ‘22?

Francis: Unless there are some exceptions of people, I mean, perhaps they were taken prisoner and then released, or of course they were wounded and at that point they were discharged.

But there's no systemic system for someone who's been serving for that long, just to say, “Well now I'm finished, I can go home.”

Unfortunately, and that's a big grievance of the military so far because they've been like, “We've gone through so much. We went through — you have people who went through the defence of Kyiv, and then they were sent down in counteroffensives, near Kherson, and then immediately they were taken straight to Bakhmut, and then they took part in the counter offensive later.

And it's like, how much more do you expect me to give to this country?

Jakub: Going through incredibly intense battle to incredibly intense battle. I think that's the other thing is a lot of this is not sort of passive serving, sort of on the border. It's going from one hot zone to another. That sounds absolutely horrific.

So, you recently spent time with the 42nd Mechanized Brigade near Bakhmut. Can you tell us a little bit about the experiences of frontline troops and who is it that has been called up? How have they been serving? Can you give us a feel of what the situation is on the ground?

Francis: So, the 42nd was just quite an interesting brigade to work with in the sense that they're not very well known. They definitely don't have this famous brand of some of these veteran brigades or Air Assault Brigades or 3rd Assault or 47th Mechanized, which got the Leopards and Bradleys, which I talked about earlier.

They are just one of a couple of dozen kind of new brigades that were formed already within the full-scale war, just with this basic understanding that, okay, we need these new brigades to be formed from scratch with mobilised people, more or less because the volunteers, they already went, they already spread out.

And so, it was an interesting experience. They got a lot of their senior commander core from the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade who I also worked with near Bakhmut last year.

And a lot of these brigades, they have this kind of regional identity because their base is from one area and their recruitment offices in those regions are funnelling them into this or that brigade.

And so, the 47th it had almost everyone was from Western Ukraine specifically in Northwestern Ukraine. So, Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Oblast and I had a very positive personal experience with them because they were just all simple guys who knew exactly why they were here.

They were all pretty patriotic, I guess you could say, and not overly complaining. They'd been fighting before in the Lyman Forest area, but that's already, that's like they'd been fighting for one year. So, imagine the people who've been fighting for twice that amount of time. It's potentially a little bit of a different story.

And of course, the other thing, which I can't talk enough about whenever someone asks me about the mood of the soldiers or how they're doing physically or mentally-

Jakub: I was about to ask. Yeah.

Francis: Yeah. Not only it's a huge difference what kind of unit it is, how long they've been fighting, where they've been fighting. So, have they been deployed, for example, in a very quiet area on the state border with Russia or in an area of the frontline, which isn't moving. That's a huge contingency factor on what the experience of this unit and the soldiers are in this unit.

But I think more importantly, even more kind of consequential for a given soldier's morale, how they're feeling is whether they're in infantry or whether they're doing something else.

Because if their job is infantry, if their job is an assault soldier, for example, and their job is to sit in the zero line trench for anywhere between 3 to 10 days at a time, we're talking about winter, we're talking about perhaps being sent on assault or being there tasked with defending against enemy assaults, these human wave assaults backed by huge amounts of artillery and now backed by FPV drones as well.

The amount of stories I'm hearing from infantry on the zero line who are just constantly targeted by enemy FPV drones, which can actually fly into trenches, which changes the whole dynamic of how safe you can be in that zero line.

I mean, it's just impossible to compare the experience of infantry with the experience of almost anyone else.

So, I was working with the 42nd with a mortar unit and the mortars in a way they're the smallest artillery kind of, they're very close to the infantry. They're up close and personal with the daily kind of ebb and flow of the front, but still they're about — I mean, I was with a large mortar, so they were about four kilometres back from the zero line.

And that makes a huge difference because they're not expected to assault positions. They're not expected to fight off Russian human wave assaults, and they're already out of the range of most Russian modifier and FPV drones, and they have these shifts five days at a time on the positions, then five days back in their houses.

But I was in these positions, and it was cold and they were more or less set up, they could make them really nice because they weren't being blasted to bits by artillery constantly.

So, you could stay warm, you could huddle up and it's more or less tolerable, and that's just not something you can compare to the job of the infantry. But unfortunately, it's the infantry who are in many ways, always the most needed.

Jakub: They need to be replenished the most.

Francis: Yeah. And they take the most losses. And they just have the worst time in general.

Jakub: So, let's talk a little bit about this issue of infantry and basically the question that this is one of the worst assignments that you can get, one of the most difficult, challenging, and also, this is the biggest threat to your life.

Ukraine clearly needs infantry; it has a deficit in terms of manpower. So, does Russia, and they're both trying to fill that in their own ways. What have been the suggestions there? Because essentially Ukraine is facing the question of who are we ready to sacrifice in order to ensure the survival of our society?

Francis: Yeah. So, one thing, and this is something that there's very little hard data for, unfortunately, but something that is noticed a lot by people all over within the military, within Ukraine in general.

And I really hate making comparisons to Russia, but it would also be a bit of an illusion to pretend that there's not something similar going on here, which is that there's a high proportion of people targeted for just simple mobilisation, grabbing someone and sending them to the infantry.

For example, in remote villages across Ukraine, kind of less of a lower socioeconomic level compared to metropolitan Kyiv, for example, specifically Kyiv. I mean, even Lviv and Odesa and Dnipro have reputations for recruiting officers being very active there, but Kyiv for some reason seems to be more immune to this.

And not only that, but yeah, just going after people who are potentially a little bit older. They're just more kind of blue-collar workers, for example, or agricultural workers. And it's just a strange thing to talk about because you don't want to put people into these boxes.

And again, there's no hard data from it. But people, friends of mine who come from villages in Western Ukraine say that the male population in these villages has been pretty much reduced by half or by a third, or by even more, because most of them have just been mobilised.

And there's this issue of the conscription age, there's arguments about … because now it's 27, and now they're talking about lowering it to 25, which is just a two-year difference.

But there's also this broader philosophical question about should we be taking more of the young people because they're the ones who are more physically fit.

Physical fitness is super important, especially for frontline infantry, or should we continue taking many people who are over the age of 40 or even 50. It's tricky, but these people need to come from somewhere.

Jakub: So, there's also been discussions, and I've seen this, it sounds kind of dystopian, but about essentially prioritising conscription of people who are below a certain level of income, of a certain threshold of paying taxes.

That obviously sounds quite dystopian, but it also rings true with what you're saying. And I guess the logic from the Ukrainian government standpoint is that we want to maintain the economic base. There's been other proposals about a potential lottery. Where do you see this going?

Francis: Yeah, the lottery is interesting, I guess, but also very difficult to imagine that being kind of implemented fairly in Ukraine. But yeah, what has come up more often is this economic question, the idea of specifically people paying much higher taxes and people voluntarily paying a certain fee to be exempt or to be allowed to leave the country.

But then again, there's a huge backlash against that. I mean, people do notice how awfully dystopian that kind of sounds.

Jakub: I mean, it already seems apparent from what you're saying about recruitment officers being in Drahobrat. The sort of the cheaper resort, but not in Bukovel, which is where the elites and the various celebrities and things like that go. So, it seems to already be happening on the ground, but formalising it is taking it to the next level.

Francis: Well, yeah, I mean that's the kind of paradox, isn't it? I mean, if it's already happening and it's just bad and dystopian, although there might be a rational explanation for it, but actually formalising it and making this the open rule of the country that if you have money, then you won't be sent to war. You can avoid it.

And if you don't, then you have a higher chance. I mean, that would be a step in the wrong direction. I think many people agree.

Jakub: What about the issue of draft dodging? To what extent is this a big problem both in terms of the people who are trying to avoid the draft, whether it's through bribes, fake medical records, illegal crossings? Is that a major phenomenon that we're seeing? Is it on the rise?

Francis: It's hard to exactly get a sense of the scale of it and how that could affect future mobilisation e efforts and affect discourse in society in general. But it's been a problem since the start of the full-scale war.

I remember I was in a hostel in Moldova, in summer 2022. It was just a normal tourist hostel, but there were some Ukrainian refugees, but there were also about five Ukrainian guys who had just made their way run across the border. I don't know, some paid their way, some went through across the river or something like that.

And that's the reality. It's still possible. People talk about it sometimes that there are these telegram channels that you can go to, and message and they help organise it. The price of it is consistently around 4 or 5, $6,000.

And it's still a thing. Unfortunately, a lot of people, especially if we're talking about kind of more higher socioeconomic status people, young men working in IT, they're often the ones who make this decision. Some are more ashamed of it than others, I just have personal stories there.

But again, of course I don't have the right to judge as a foreign citizen. But yeah, it's happening. And then, yeah, other people, they know friends who are just kind of hiding. They understand the risk of being handed summons in person. And again, this depends a lot on where you are in Ukraine.

So, in Kyiv, I haven't heard as much of this worry from my friends, for example, who are conscription age. And sometimes you see people in uniform walking about.

But there's not that culture of fear that has been reported on in cities like Odesa or Dnipro, let alone places more in the countryside, especially the border regions I think Zakarpattia, Bukovina, Odesa region where there is potentially more of a chance of people actually trying to get across.

And then that's where efforts to catch them, not only to catch them, but to recruit people are higher as well. Personally, I had one instance where I was approached by recruiting officers and obviously that didn't go anywhere because they had a foreign passport, but that was right on the border with Hungary, actually.

Jakub: It's interesting that you mentioned Odesa as being one of the harsher places. There was also that story last year where I believe one of the mobilisation officers had issued a lot of essentially waivers, I think for the price that you mentioned, 4 or 5, $6,000 and then bought a villa in the Spanish Coast using that.

What are the plans to address corruption that inevitably comes with increased mobilisation?

Francis: Unfortunately, there are no like clear mechanisms and also not in the draft law, where it’s like, this is what we're going to do to really clamp down on this. Everyone claims that they want to improve this and make it better.

And obviously you do have state bodies whose job it is to handle this. So, the SBU and the investigative committee and NABU, who will inevitably, if there's enough of a evidence and enough of a scandal, eventually look into something and conduct some raids and seize some property and maybe arrest some people.

But unfortunately, there's no immediate clear pathway to have a stricter approach to this.

And this issue of the recruiting officers, their corruption and their practices, this is at the centre of the social kind of issues caused by mobilisation. On one hand they have one of the most unenviable jobs in the world, I would say, filling in quotas and forcing people to go to war.

But when it comes to this dirty work, there's also a lot of dirty business behind the dirty work. And I've heard a lot of public soldiers and high-ranking officials in the military saying that a big way to improve mobilisation and to make it all happen without that social backlash would just be to have it with more respect.

Have it done, letting people, giving them time to finish their business before they go to the army to not be worried about being stuffed into a bus on the street and to not have this reputation of corruption and sometimes violent abuse in these recruiting centres. But there's no immediate roadmap of how that will be improved.

Jakub: Looking back at the coming weeks, what do you expect to see from the legislation around the mobilisation?

First of all, is it likely that we'll have a definitive version of the law anytime soon, let's say over the next month or two? And do you expect that it will become harsher or perhaps softened down a little bit?

Francis: Yeah, so when the draft law first came out, you had people from Zelenskyy’s party talking publicly about how this is about finding a compromise. And so, the big question with the draft law is like, what is the compromise between?

And that goes back to this dynamic between the military leadership, the defence ministry and Zaluzhnyi and the political leadership finding a compromise of where we can reach a point where this gives us enough tools to mobilise more people at the scale we need to, but it won't cause as much backlash for being just too harsh and too heavy handed.

And so, that's what we can see will probably be developing in the next few weeks, I think. I mean, I think there's no other option then for the country to come to an agreement about this and for that to start to be passed and to start being implemented.

We already had an announcement from this same MP, Goncharenko from Poroshenko’s party saying that it looked like the idea of being able to conscript people in this third disability group again, that's the least serious.

So, things like diabetes for example, that probably won't make it into the final, at least the first draft law that the actual Verkhovna Rada, the parliament will have a look at.

So, I think something will make it through in the next few weeks. I don't see the benefit for anyone, whether it's the politicians, the military, the country to drag this on for too long because there's already enough of a constant storm around this issue.

And I think at the end of the day, the politics is not toxic enough at this point in Ukraine where anyone is willing to really put the country's security at risk for politics.

So, this will continue at the moment where it's still in the stage where things are fanning out into different versions of the draft law and different committees looking at it and all giving their own opinion.

So, it's taking a little bit longer than maybe that some people expected, but eventually we'll start seeing that converge on some kind of consensus that can be looked at in parliament and eventually passed.

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Alright, Francis, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines.

Francis: Thanks Jakub. It was a pleasure. Have a good one.

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