NEW YORK, August 20. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenky asked the country’s Western allies to help get draft-age Ukrainian refugees back home but has received a refusal, Bloomberg said.

Zelensky "has been trying to get his allies to help get more men of fighting age back to Ukraine, asking them in bilateral meetings for help," it said, adding that "politicians from Poland to Hungary have said they won’t send refugees back as long as the war rages on."

However, the agency did not provide a list of countries the Ukrainian leader turned to with such requests.

According to Bloomberg, one of the reasons such a refusal could be labor scarcity countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular Poland and the Czech Republic, are facing. "To be blunt, many Czech companies depend on Ukrainian refugees’ skills and hard work. <…>The construction industry, for example, would come to a complete standstill without Ukrainian workers," Tomas Prouza, the head of a Czech business structure and former Czech State Secretary for European Affairs, was quoted as saying.

More than six Ukrainian refugees are staying outside Ukraine, the agency cited data from the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. Up to 400,000 more Ukrainians may flee the country this year, according to the Ukrainian National Bank.

General mobilization was announced in Ukraine in February 2022 and has been extended several times since, with the authorities doing everything possible so that draft-age men cannot evade military service. Men of the draft age are banned from leaving the country (with few exceptions) and those who want to be granted draft determent need to have a package of documents confirming their right to this. According to the Ukrainian media, many men now choose not to leave their homes for months or flee the country, legally or illegally, out of fear of being forcibly dragooned into the army and sent to the combat zone. Videos of drafting young men by force surface on Ukrainian social networks regularly. Despite this, on April 16 Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a controversial law toughening mobilization rules, which is called to help draft hundreds of thousands of fresh soldiers.