Military aid, social spending, and no end in sight. Patience seems to be exhausted in Poland. Ukraine is now recruiting volunteers there; few.
Lublin – “I think many Poles are outraged when they see young Ukrainians in hotels and cafes and hear how much effort we have to make to help Ukraine,” said Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz in March this year. “However, the form of assistance that Poland provides depends on the Ukrainian side,” the Polish Defense Minister emphasized to the broadcaster Polsat News. In Poland, the mood is shifting against the integration of refugee men of military age from Ukraine. Now the war party has opened an office in Poland to accommodate volunteers heading to the Ukraine war – with limited success.
The office in Lublin, around 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, has “all the necessary equipment” to determine the suitability of volunteers for service, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Ivan Gavryliuk said in a statement Kyiv Post reported. Since the middle of this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been trying to draw on the reservoir of young men who have fled abroad. Since the start of the war, Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been banned from leaving their country; yet many live outside the country.
Zelenskyj is mobilizing: he wants to recruit up to half a million soldiers
According to various media reports, Zelensky wants to recruit half a million more soldiers. Opposite the US broadcaster CNN Former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said in February this year: “Maybe not half a million, but still hundreds of thousands.” In order to lure them, Kiev itself is still “looking for the right tone,” like them Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) wrote in May. She was referring to Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umjerov, who told the Picture had expressed that he wanted to draft Ukrainians living in Germany who were fit for military service into military service in 2024. Initially, however, the excavation seems to be taking place in Poland.
“It is an urgent moral appeal and we should definitely support it politically. These people are here because there is a war going on there – and they simply have to do their part to end this war.”
After all, in addition to Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland are the main escape points for Ukrainian refugees; The situation is getting worse there too. At the end of April the news agency had Reuters reports that the Ukrainian government has temporarily made it impossible for young men to apply for passports abroad as part of its efforts to address the troop shortage. At the same time, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba reported on the platform X (formerly Twitter) spoke out and announced that men abroad would be denied consular services.
Like the magazine Reporting Democracy reported, he wrote: “A man of military age has gone abroad, shown his state that he does not care about its survival, and then he comes and wants a benefit from that state. That’s not how it works. Our country is at war.” Now men living in Poland have the opportunity to return to their homeland via the army.
“Ukrainian Legion”: The foundation for this is the refugees capable of military service
The recruiting office in Lublin is intended to lay the foundation for a “Ukrainian Legion”. According to the medium Notes from Poland The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said that around 200 volunteers had already signed up. Apparently around 140 applications were received online and 58 via consulates, the magazine writes.
The announcement of the opening of the recruiting office apparently came close to a statement by the Polish Defense Minister that his country had been ready to train the Legion for more than a month; However, the Ukrainian side must organize the recruits. According to Kosiniak-Kamysz, the volunteers will then be trained in the country itself. The screening would take the form of an interview followed by a medical test.
“If they then sign a contract, the volunteers will undergo 35 days of training by the Polish military, said Ivan Havryliuk. ‘In the future they could be sent to one of the European NATO bases for a few more months to improve their skills,’ he added Notes from Poland added. According to the Ukrainian deputy defense minister, Ukraine is providing uniforms and logistical support for the program, while Poland is supplying weapons and other equipment.
Changing mood: “The shadow of ‘Ukraine fatigue’ hovers over Polish politics”
As early as July, Radosław Sikorski was said to have suggested that “several thousand” Ukrainians living in Poland had signed up for a voluntary military unit – according to him, reason enough for other European countries to start similar initiatives. Apparently the Polish Foreign Minister had Volodymyr Zelenskyy tie a bear on him, according to the leading Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna is said to have corrected it, citing anonymous sources.
Accordingly be Sikorski was “misled” by Ukraine about the Ukrainians’ alleged great interest in volunteering for the Legion, as Notes from Poland reported at the beginning of October. According to the media, Sikorsky would have called for social benefits for Ukrainian men of military age to be reduced in Europe in order to avoid that refusal to do military service would also be rewarded.
Those too FAZ has summed up the fundamentally opposing tendencies: “In addition to the billions in military aid for Ukraine, does Germany also have to provide for its deserters? Others ask: How could you condemn someone for not wanting to die in war? Questions that concern the whole of Europe – perhaps especially in Poland, as its direct neighbor to the front. “The shadow of ‘Ukraine fatigue’ hovers over Polish politics,” the British newspaper recently said BBC titled. An abrupt change in mood.
Germany asks louder: Why military aid and additional citizens’ money?
“Now you suddenly have the feeling that the political knives have been drawn against Kiev,” writes BBC-Author Sarah Rainsford. According to her, the Polish president was unequivocal when he spoke of a possible end to arms deliveries: “Andrzej Duda compared Ukraine to a drowning man who risks dragging his rescuers into the depths.”
In Germany, too, people are increasingly asking why men of military age lived here instead of fighting at the front in their homeland – the news magazine Mirror last discussed this in June. According to its columnist Nikolaus Blome, it seems paradoxical that “German money from Ukraine finances weapons for the defensive war, but at the same time German (citizens’) money from Ukraine indirectly deprives Ukraine of soldiers for the war,” as he writes.
According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, 203,640 male Ukrainian citizens of military age have entered Germany since the start of the war in Ukraine. Nobody knows who actually fled from military service. Germany’s Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) could not imagine that the state would put pressure on Ukrainian men currently residing in Germany, “since our constitution stipulates for German citizens that no one has to serve as a weapon against their will, or that we “We can then force people from other countries to do this,” as the magazine put it Legal Tribune Online quoted.
Buschmann refers to this, loudly Legal Tribune Onlineto the principles of military service laid down in the Basic Law (GG). Article 12a, Paragraph 2, Sentence 1 of the Basic Law states: “Anyone who refuses military service with a weapon for reasons of conscience can be obliged to perform alternative service.” Johann Wadephul wants this to be handled more strictly; If able-bodied men withdrew support from their homeland, that could not be approved, the CDU member of the Defense Committee told the Deutschlandfunk.
However, the member of the Bundestag also sees voluntariness as being addressed here rather than using coercion, as he did to the World said: “It is an urgent moral appeal and we should definitely support it politically. These people are here because there is a war going on there – and they simply have to do their part to end this war.”
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