Cut, Delay And Make Voluntary. Defense Ministry Offers Changes In Women’s Military Registration

The Main Directorate of Personnel of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine proposed a number of changes to the procedure for putting women on a military register, in particular, making it voluntary, delaying it for some time and reducing the list of professions who will be required to register.

Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar wrote about this on her Facebook page.

Recall that at the end of last year, the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced that women liable for military service should be registered with the military by the end of 2022.

At the same time, as of mid-July, about 1% of the total number of mobilized were women drafted into the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Maliar notes that the experience of deploying all units of the Armed Forces and other military formations to wartime states showed that now there is no urgent need in Ukraine to significantly increase the number of women on military records.

"At the same time, for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, there remains a need for specialties and specialists in medicine, radio engineering, food technologies," Maliar said.

According to her, given this, the Main Directorate of Personnel of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine proposes to make the following changes to the relevant legislative and regulatory acts on putting women on the military register:

1. Reduction of the list of specialties or professions related to the relevant military registration specialties, after receiving which women are taken on the military register - in accordance with the current needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
2. Voluntary military registration of women who received specialties, which are in the revised list.
3. To determine that the organization of taking women on military records in Ukraine will begin no earlier than a month after the end of a special period in the state.

The Deputy Minister also noted that the mandatory placement of women on military records is the norm of the law (Article 1 of Paragraph 11 "On military duty and military service").

Maliar stressed that neither the Ministry of Defense nor the General Staff can change the law.

"If this norm is changed, the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff will fulfill it. From ourselves, we have prepared proposals for these changes in the direction of voluntariness and our version of the bill is now being agreed in other ministries," Maliar wrote.

According to her, in any case, the decision will be made by the Verkhovna Rada.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, on July 15, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced that women would be put on the military register only if they agreed.

At the same time, the General Staff noted that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia, about 7,000 women have been called up to the Armed Forces.

And at the end of the month, Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar said that in total more than 50,000 women serve in the Armed Forces, of which about 5,000 are on the front line.

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