It is high time to start conscripting women, Ukrainian lawmaker Mariana Bezuglaya has said as Kiev’s military struggles to meet mobilization quotas.
Ukraine currently allows for drafting men over the age of 25 and accepts female volunteers, but Bezuglaya has repeatedly advocated for expanding conscription to both sexes in the name of equity.
“We currently have illegal discrimination against men,” Bezuglaya wrote on her Telegram channel on Monday. “Moreover, if women get mobilized, fewer men will get mobilized – this is one of the reasons for men to support the mobilization of their fellow [female] citizens.”
According to the lawmaker, mobilized women should get assigned to duties in the rear, such as clerks, personnel officers and in the security units, freeing up the men to get moved to frontline duties and combat brigades. Others could be sent to military factories to boost the pace of production.
“War cannot be an affair of the chosen ones, especially when it is not just about territories or spheres of influence, but about a nation’s existence and the right to life,” Bezuglaya wrote, adding that without the kind of mobilization she advocates, Ukraine is “doomed to lose” the war and its statehood as well.
Bezuglaya noted that she has repeatedly submitted this proposal to the defense committee of the Verkhovna Rada, only to have the government and the generals shoot it down.
“It’s a paradox,” she wrote. “The Defense Ministry has failed in the mobilization policy, the generals are literally destroying their soldiers with ill-considered decisions, but this topic is not raised – it is too delicate, you see. Perhaps mobilized women would bring order to this chaos.”
Bezuglaya’s comments come after another MP, Roman Kostenko, claimed that Kiev would need to draft another 500,000 men to replenish combat losses and rotate the battle-worn units along the front. Kostenko, himself a veteran, revealed that the mobilization has been falling behind over the last two months.
A member of Vladimir Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ party, Bezuglaya has frequently clashed with the Ukrainian military due to her hardline policies on the conflict against Russia. At one point she was added to Kiev’s Mirotvorets ‘kill list’ and in September, she survived a vote to oust her from the defense committee. Her jurisdiction was previously represented by Andrey Biletsky, founder of the neo-Nazi ‘Azov’ militia.
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