MOSCOW, January 10. /TASS/. Ukraine’s defense ministry will not submit any bills to parliament asking to demobilize those serving since February 2022, since it currently has no way of replacing these men, Deputy Defense Minister Ivan Gavrilyuk said.
"The law has been drafted and is ready to be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada (parliament - TASS) via the cabinet of ministers. However, before submitting the bill, we need to work out a way to replace all these men who are up for demobilization. <…> This will take about three more months," the RBC-Ukraine agency quoted him as telling lawmakers.
General mobilization was announced in Ukraine in February 2022 and has been extended several times since. However, the effective law on military service doesn’t set time limits for military service for those mobilized during martial law. Amid staffing problems in the army, the country’s authorities drafted a law toughening mobilization rules, promising to clearly specify the duration of army service and demobilization conditions for those drafted to the army at the very beginning of the conflict. However, these provisions were not included in the final version of the law, and the parliament announced it would work on a separate bill addressing mobilization.
Since 2023, family members of those serving in the army since the beginning of the conflict have been staging protests demanding their demobilization. In October 2024, Fyodor Venislavsky, a member of the national security, defense and intelligence committee at Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, acknowledged that it would be a "threat to national security" to set any time frames for army service amid personnel shortages and understaffing.