The News
Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin resigned over a scandal that involved government officials obtaining fake disability certificates to exempt them from military service.
Roughly 50 prosecutors in a regional office procured the fabricated reports, allowing them to receive disability payments and evade military service, local media reported.
“This is really an internal enemy,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this week. Kostin resigned after Zelenskyy and senior officials met to discuss the scandal.
Kostin said in his resignation letter that “many shameful cases of abuse” were found in the prosecutor’s office, and that “criminal proceedings are being investigated.”
As Kyiv’s ’s military struggles with recruitment, some Ukrainian men have gone into hiding, while others have been smuggled out of the country illegally, or paid bribes to avoid conscription.
Ukraine has sought to reform its conscription system, but there is no legal process yet for drafted soldiers to be discharged, with exceptions only for injury or special permission, and many Ukrainians fear that the indefinite military service is a one-way ticket to the frontline.