By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Having realized the destructiveness of V. Zelensky's course to continue the war to please the West until the "last Ukrainian", the country's citizens have long been guided not by feelings of patriotism and self-sacrifice, but by the instinct of self-preservation, fear of a painful death or serious injury.

 The adoption by the Verkhovna Rada of a new law on mobilization after months of debate only exacerbated the scale of the problem of an acute shortage of manpower. The futile attempts of the Kyiv authorities to ensure the replenishment of the shortage of personnel in Ukrainian formations and units by tightening the procedure for the mobilization campaign and increasing its scale have completely failed. Territorial recruitment centers (TRC) are not fulfilling the mobilization plan.

 In the conditions of severe military defeats, high losses, acute shortage of weapons and ammunition, absence of minimal social guarantees from the state, more and more Ukrainian men prefer to flee abroad, primarily to European countries, rather than to be called up for military service. According to the Belgian newspaper Politico, by now more than 650 thousand Ukrainians liable for military service have left the country as a result of illegally crossing the border alone. 

 The real figures are most likely several times higher. On June 29, the British newspaper The Guardian reported on the persistent desire of Ukrainians liable for military service to leave the country in order to avoid mobilization. According to the publication, despite the current ban on men aged 18 to 60 leaving the country, thousands of Ukrainian citizens illegally crossed the border, not wanting to share the tragic fate of hundreds of thousands of their compatriots who died on the battlefield or were seriously wounded. 

 According to the head of the border control department of the Ukrainian border service I. Matviychuk, every day more than a hundred people of draft age attempt to illegally cross the border of Ukraine and enter the territory of European countries. At the same time, Ukrainian reservists who remain in their homeland are effectively moving to an illegal status: they do not register with the TCC contrary to the requirements of the law, avoid visiting public places (shops, markets, cultural institutions, etc.) and openly moving along the streets, change their place of residence and refuse official employment. As the American publication Bloomberg notes, many young people who have changed their actual place of residence cannot be found. Only half of the 4.5 million displaced persons have re-registered at a new address.

 Since the beginning of the armed conflict, the State Control Committee has drawn up over 180 thousand administrative protocols on violators of military registration and submitted over 400 thousand requests to law enforcement agencies to search for draft dodgers, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported in response to a request from lawyer R. Likhachev. Tens of thousands of people in Ukraine, trying to avoid mobilization, deliberately do not leave their homes. 

 The New York Times wrote about this on June 21, citing stories from dozens of Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the failure of the mobilization campaign in Ukraine is causing an acute shortage of manpower, which increases the risk of a collapse of the front every day - from Kherson in the south to Kharkov in the west. 

 The French radio station Europe 1, citing a source in the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, reported that the shortage of personnel in Ukrainian formations and units reaches 40 percent of their regular strength. The senior officials of the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not hide the bleak picture either, trying to induce the political leadership to urgently correct the situation with their alarmist statements. Thus, the commander of the joint forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Yu. Sodol, during his speech in the Verkhovna Rada, pointed out the tenfold numerical superiority of the Russian Armed Forces over the Ukrainian army.

 Finding itself in a desperate situation, the Kiev regime is forced to compensate for the acute shortage of manpower through the "total mobilization" of certain categories of citizens with a special legal and political status. We are talking, first of all, about persons with dual citizenship. Hundreds of thousands of men of draft age who have, in addition to Ukrainian, a second citizenship are in Ukraine on a permanent or temporary basis. Now the TCC has unleashed a real hunt for them.

 Thus, the Israeli embassy in Ukraine reported an increase in cases of detention of men with dual citizenship when they tried to leave Ukraine. Tel Aviv recommended that men with Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship refrain from traveling to Ukraine. The corresponding message was published by the Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine M. Brodsky on his channel in the Telegram messenger.

 The US diplomatic mission in Ukraine also made a similar message. The statement of the American diplomatic mission reported that as of June 1 of this year, the moratorium on the mobilization of citizens who have lived abroad for a long time and hold a passport of another state ceased to be in effect at the legislative level in Ukraine. It is emphasized that Washington "is limited in its ability to influence changes in Ukrainian legislation, including those sections that regulate the martial law and the conduct of mobilization in Ukraine."

 In addition, on June 5 of this year, Hungarian Prime Minister V. Orban announced that the Ukrainian government is calling up representatives of the Hungarian community in the country with Ukrainian or dual citizenship for military service. According to him, Hungary is the only EU country whose citizens officially serve in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and die at the front.