Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services to military-age men abroad, except for those due to return to Ukraine, in an effort to encourage conscription in the war against Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men of military age live abroad, and the country is facing an acute shortage of soldiers against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months after a full-scale Russian invasion.
Foreign Affairs Minister Dmitro Kuleba said in a statement that he ordered measures to restore what he described as fair treatment to men of mobilization age.
“How it looks now: a man of the military age went abroad, showed his country that he does not care about its survival, and then comes and wants to receive services from the same country. That’s not how it works. Our country is at war,” he stated on the X social network.
Kuleba wrote in the post that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will soon clarify the procedure for men of military age to obtain consular services.
As of January 2024, about 4.3 million Ukrainians live in the countries of the European Union, of which about 860,000 are adult men, according to the database of the European statistics agency Eurostat.
Ukraine introduced a state of emergency at the beginning of the war, prohibiting men aged 18 to 60 from traveling abroad without special provisions and introducing the mobilization of civilian men into the armed forces, Reuters reminds.
