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New wave of military drafting to begin in Ukraine

On Monday, President Petro Poroshenko signed a bill on partial conscription

KIEV, January 20. /TASS/. A new wave of highly controversial drafting for service in the Armed Forces begins in Ukraine on Tuesday. It will be followed by two more waves in April and June.

Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak said earlier some 104,000 individuals could be conscribed this year all in all, while the current wave of drafting would pluck some 50,000 men out of everyday civilian life.

On Monday, President Petro Poroshenko signed a bill on partial conscription. He gave the assurances that the individuals conscribed for the first time would not be dispatched to the zone of the so-called ‘antiterrorist operation’ in the east of the country.

The drafting will not embrace the individuals who are not qualified for health reasons, students and postgraduates, clerics, parents of three or more children, and residents of the territories uncontrolled by the Kiev government.

Authorities said earlier that women in the age group of twenty-five to fifty years old might also be drafted if need be.

Officials at the presidential administration said all the government officials and public employees, except for members of parliament and deputies of regional legislatures, were subject to conscription.

In the meantime, representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which is a party to the Minsk consultations of the Contact Group for settling the armed civil conflict in the southeast of the country, have described the new wave of conscription as a yet another gross encroachment on the accords signed in Minsk last September.

“Poroshenko’s decree contradicts the provision of the accords on scaling down the military activity along the contact line,” said Denis Pushin, the Donetsk Republic’s plenipotentiary representative at the Minsk talks. “The new drafting will only fuel activity on the part of the Ukrainian military.”.