Fighting MP Kostenko for reducing mobilization age to 20 years

Roman Kostenko, Secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, Member of Parliament from the Holos faction, is in favor of lowering the mobilization age to 20 years.

He said this in an interview with Ukrainian Pravda, Ukrainian News Agency reports.

"I myself have been in the army since the age of 17 and I will say this: we are not talking about 18, but I believe that we should have a conscription age from 20 to 50. Everyone after that can be mobilized at their own will, but not in combat units. If we want to properly provide combat units, so that healthy people go and can perform combat tasks, this should be the age range of 20-50 years," he said.

In his opinion, a million-strong army in Ukraine is not enough, because "we are fighting with one million personnel against such a large country as the russian federation."

Kostenko believes that the points on motivation for joining the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which were adopted in the law on mobilization, are not working well.

"But if we talk about the law in general, it improved mobilization. We had a failure of mobilization starting from the summer of 2023. We then failed the counteroffensive, there were replacements of military commissars. And I will say that in December we were told that we had less than 10,000 mobilized per month. With the sanitary losses we suffered, it seemed that this was the end," he added.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, Kostenko went on a "business trip" to the territory of the aggressor country of russia.

In the published video, he crosses the border with the aggressor country in military uniform.

It is not known where exactly the MP went, but in the video he says that "he was not allowed to go west, so he went to the north", where the Kursk Oblast is located.