Ukraine Shuts Down Scheme Allowing Ukrainians To Escape Conscription By Posing As Students

Authorities in Ukraine said they shut down two operations in the country that offered to illegally transport would-be draft dodgers abroad for a fee of up to $3,500.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) detained a local in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv who established a channel to illegally transport citizens eligible for military service to other countries under the pretext that they would pursue higher education studies in member states of the European Union, the intelligence agency said in a statement released Monday.

He allegedly offered false education invitations, student cards and study certificates, with a “package” costing €1,500 ($1,504).

The unnamed local, who was detained by members of the SSU while trying to sell one such package, had set up an underground workshop with appropriate printing equipment in his own apartment and made the forged documents himself, according to Ukrainian authorities.

He planned to make millions of profits, the SSU said.

Ukraine’s security service was also able to apprehend the organizer of a similar scheme in the city of Kropyvnytskyi.

The organizer, who was not named in the statement, sold fake identity cards for internally displaced people who supposedly needed medical rehabilitation abroad.

His services cost $3,500 per person, according to the SSU.

During a search of the organizer’s home, the security service found computer equipment and a mobile phone with evidence of unlawful activity.

They also discovered official forms of medical institutions and military commissariats of Ukraine’s partially Russian-occupied Kherson region as well as counterfeits ready for sale, according to authorities.

SSU investigators will notify detainees of suspicion of crime under Article 332.3 of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, or the illegal transportation of persons across the country’s border, the SSU said.

Pre-trial investigations are underway, the agency noted.

Ukraine, which inherited the policy of military conscription from the Soviet Union, ended the compulsory draft in 2013, but it was reinstated the following year when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula.

A planned change of Ukraine’s military training system would have resulted in the end of conscription in the country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in February.

However, Russia’s invasion upended these plans, and Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 eligible for military service are forbidden from leaving Ukraine following Zelensky’s declaration of martial law at the start of the conflict.