Ukrainian Parliament approves mobilization project to increase the number of troops | Russia-Ukraine war news

General tells parliament that Russian forces outnumber Kiev’s soldiers by up to 10 times on battlefields in the east.

Ukraine’s parliament has approved a bill to overhaul how the military recruits civilians in a bid to increase its troop numbers, more than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The bill, which removed a set of draconian penalties to prevent conscription and sparked public outrage, was supported by the military.

Before the bill’s passage on Thursday, a general told parliament that Russia has up to 10 times more troops than Ukraine on battlefields in the east.

“Pass this law and the Ukrainian military will not let you or the Ukrainian people down,” Gen. Yuriy Sodol told lawmakers.

“We are maintaining our defenses with our last strength,” he said as lawmakers stood and applauded more than a dozen commanders who participated in the session.

Military analysts said Ukraine’s military needs to resolve acute manpower and artillery shortages as better-equipped Russian forces advance in the east.

“The enemy outnumbers us seven to ten times. We lack manpower,” said Sodol, who commands Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine.

The bill was approved with a majority of 283 votes in the 450-member parliament, Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a lawmaker from the Holos party, wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

The bill still needs to be signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before it becomes law.

Draft dodging penalties removed

The legislation aims to give the military a better indication of how many people they can call up and where they are located.

The bill gives Ukrainian men 60 days to update their personal data with military authorities. Until now, cabinet projects have depended on sometimes incomplete and old data.

It also eliminates a number of far-reaching penalties for draft evasion that were proposed in a previous bill, creating outrage. There were thousands of cases of draft evasion during the war.

The bill also eliminated a previous clause on the demobilization of soldiers who fought for 36 months, meaning wartime military service remains open.

Lawmaker Oleksandr Fedienko said passing the bill would send a “message to our partners that we are ready to retake our territory and we need weapons.” Ukraine faces a slowdown in Western military assistance.

Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, said the law would not lead to “miracles” on the battlefield. “Without a doubt, it will bring a little more order and systematicity in general to the issue of mobilization,” he said on television, adding that it would not solve all the problems.

“Personally, I would make it much more difficult and also continue to lower the draft age.”

Last week, Zelenskyy signed into law separate legislation to lower the draft age from 27 to 25. Parliament is considering another bill that would allow convicts serving suspended sentences to fight in the army. Lawmaker Mariana Bezuhla criticized the project on Facebook, saying: “They made it as bland and confusing as possible and months were wasted.”

It took parliament several months to submit the latest bill to a final vote this week, as politicians accused each other of drafting poorly worded amendments and lacking the political will to pass unpopular changes.

More than 4,000 amendments were tabled after the first reading in February. Deputies rejected most of the amendments and significantly diluted the initial proposals on punishments for those who tried to evade the project.