Heavy fighting on the front lines of Russia’s full-scale invasion, dragging out for almost three years, has left thousands of Ukrainian soldiers seriously injured or killed in action.
Many still fighting for years along more than 600 miles of the front line in Ukraine’s east and south are exhausted as they face what Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, describes as “one of the most powerful Russian offensives.”
Earlier this year, the government stepped up mobilization to increase the army’s ranks by hundreds of thousands, on top of the more than 1 million currently defending the country.
Yet, the effort to scale up Ukrainian forces against an enemy with more manpower and weaponry has been tainted by mushrooming corruption scandals.
Officials in the Ukrainian healthcare system are suspected of taking bribes to help men avoid mobilization by obtaining fake disability documents through MSEC, the state medical commission responsible for clearing men to be fit to fight.
“From a human perspective, what jerks,” a Ukrainian Special Forces sniper who goes by the callsign Bart told the Kyiv Independent, responding to the alleged corrupt schemes aiding draft dodgers.
“We do our job (on the front) because someone has to do it. But there are institutions that must make decisions about (corruption),” he added.
A series of high-profile MSEC corruption scandals last month triggered public outrage and prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to act.
“This is truly an internal enemy,” Zelensky said in an address in October, days before signing a decree to liquidate the commissions by the end of the year. Officials say a rebooted, digitized system is to replace them.
"This is truly an internal enemy."
Reports of abuse date back to the early days of Russia’s full-blown war launched in 2022, when hundreds of thousands of men motivated to take up arms lined up at army recruitment centers. But the urgency to squash the schemes has mounted after Ukraine has, years into the war, stepped up forceful enlistment tactics.
The planned MSEC reform, to be introduced next year, will also serve as a litmus test of the Zelensky administration’s ability to dismantle lingering corruption in state institutions.
Success in this broader effort is vital to boosting public morale, as well as reinforcing the struggling front-line units with new recruits.
What are MSECs and how they harm Ukraine’s war effort
Ukraine’s state network of medical commissions, known as MSECs, decide whether the person is disabled and how severe the disability is.
During the war, thousands of wounded veterans had to fight a bureaucratic battle for disability status to be eligible for government payments and benefits, overwhelming MSEC, which provided services to about 2.7 million Ukrainians before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Soldiers often complained about the commission’s time-consuming, outdated, and corrupt system, which required large amounts of paperwork and could take as long as three months to grant status.
At the same time, many civilian men sought to be granted a disability status that would exempt them from military service in accordance with Ukrainian law.
Since the 1990s, the commissions have worked only with paper documents, unaffected by the state’s digitalization campaign that boosted Ukrainian mobilization this year. This allowed doctors and experts to decide on people’s disability status with barely any oversight.
It was also up to MSEC members to set a date for a person to return and get their status reviewed.
“If you have everything on paper, it is impossible to control it properly,” said Liubov Halan, co-founder of Pryncyp, the top veteran care reform organization in Ukraine that advocates for the MSEC overhaul.
The lack of oversight allowed some officials in MSEC to embrace a flow of bribes from civilians desperate to avoid military service, which have left a smaller pool of potentially less fit conscripts to draw from.
Piles of cash and draft-dodging prosecutors
Ukraine’s government announced a plan to reform the system in May 2023. Yet, it wasn’t until several consecutive scandals in October rattled the nation, prompting officials to move toward ground-breaking changes.
“Lists of ‘draft dodgers’ with fake diagnosis” were found alongside millions of dollars in cash during the search of the apartment of Tetiana Krupa, the head and chief doctor of Khmelnytskyi Oblast’s MSEC, the State Bureau of Investigation reported on Oct. 4.
"Law enforcement officers found money in the apartment in almost every corner — in wardrobes, drawers, niches," the Bureau’s statement read.
Soon after, Ukrainian news outlet Censor.NET published an investigation showing that Krupa granted Khmelnytskyi Oblast Chief prosecutor Oleksiy Oliinyk and scores of his subordinates disability status.
Now at least 51 top prosecutors supposed to guarantee the rule of law in the region are suspected of participating in the draft-dodging graft scheme.
Apart from avoiding the draft, the alleged scams helped the officials receive outsized government pensions and other benefits.
The Prosecutor General’s office launched an internal investigation, which also found that 60 prosecutors, an unusually high number, were registered as people with disabilities in Cherkasy Oblast.
In the Khmelnytsky and Cherkasy oblast cases, local MSECs declared almost a third of prosecutors unfit to fight, compared to less than 10% in other regions.
According to reports by the Security Service of Ukraine, more MSEC workers have been accused of engaging in draft-dodging corruption schemes every week since. The findings pointed to an institutionalized pattern of these schemes between MSEC and the prosecutor offices in at least two oblasts.
Zelensky administration’s response to MSEC crisis
Krupa’s case was the first public expose of a Ukrainian government official outside the military system making millions in wealth by illegally aiding the draft-dodging during the all-out Russian war.
It was also a blatant showcase of inequality between the state officials obtaining disability benefits en masse while many wounded Ukrainian soldiers sat in queues for months to do it.
Ukrainians wanted the leadership to react, punish corrupt officials, and introduce reforms to the rotten system.
Responding to people’s needs, Zelensky ordered the dissolution of medical commissions by the end of the year and, in a statement on Oct. 22, said Ukraine's Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned.
The Prosecutor General’s office launched an investigation into the prosecutors’ disability statuses. Krupa was detained, while Ukraine’s Health ministry dismissed its top officials in charge of MSEC.
“The president did the (short-term) tactics right,” said anti-corruption activist Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center's executive board. “It was necessary to give the public at least the appearance or hope of restoring justice.”
"It was necessary to give the public at least the appearance or hope of restoring justice."
However, Shabunin and other activists doubt corruption will be eliminated in the system over the long run. Nothing has changed since the corruption scandals in draft offices last year prompted the government to dismiss their heads and promise reforms.
“The main reform to ensure that there is no corruption in the MSEC is to digitalize the process,” Shabunin told the Kyiv Independent.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “If this is not resolved again, it means that all these executives are simply incapable of solving these problems.”
Cutting out the paper and corruption through digitalization
Under Zelensky’s presidency, Ukraine has successfully rooted out many layers of choking bureaucracy and room for corruption with reforms that introduced digitization of many public services, most notably through the acclaimed Diia mobile phone app.
Recent efforts to digitize men's registration as part of the army’s mobilization efforts and to provide services to soldiers currently serving have also shown promise.
The new digitalization system replacing MSEC is laid out in a reform plan approved by the government on Nov. 20 and was submitted as legislation to parliament to be adopted.
The draft law, adopted by lawmakers in a first reading but now awaiting amendments before a final vote, stipulates that current heads of medical commissions are forbidden from participating in expert groups deciding on medical disabilities. The MSEC functions are to be transferred to some regular Ukrainian hospitals.
“The plan has been developed,” the Ministry of Digital Transformation said in response to the Kyiv Independent’s inquiry.
According to the ministry, the new digital system will free patients from carrying their paper records around for visits to relevant authorities and prevent corruption, as medical experts and patients will not see each other’s names.
While the MSEC reform was promised by the government over a year ago, activists are concerned that its politically-motivated rushed implementation could hurt the welfare of people with disabilities.
“What the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Affairs should do for all persons with disabilities, including veterans, is to change the entire approach,” Halan said.
“It is not clear how it will all happen.”
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