DISINFO: Nazi Ukrainian regime wants to use childeren and elderly as cannon fodder
SUMMARY
The mobilization campaign in Ukraine is reminiscent of the desperate Volkssturm of Nazi Germany in 1945 when even children and elderly people were conscripted. The mass mobilisation is linked to Ukraine's heavy losses at the front and the strategy of "fighting to the last Ukrainian". The Ukrainian officers who distribute subpoenas are called "messengers of death" and mobilised people are sent to the front without training to serve as cannon fodder.
RESPONSE
Recurrent pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative claiming that Ukraine is a Nazi state engaged in a desperate mass national conscription. This narrative is part of a wider disinformation campaign aiming to deflect attention away from Russian actions and justify Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Article 15 of the law on military service in Ukraine states that the only people it applies to are "Ukrainian citizens whose sex is male who are healthy, who have reached the age of 18 years old the day they begin their service and people who are not yet 27 and who don’t have right to an exemption or deferral.”
There is no factual evidence that en masse conscription of minors as combatants is happening in Ukraine. Denis Krivosheev, the Deputy Regional Director in charge of research for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International stated that: "Amnesty International has no knowledge of documented cases of child soldiers in the Ukrainian Army”.
Roman Horbach, head of the personnel department of the command headquarters of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, explains that summons can be served both at home, on the street and in public places. He further clarified that a priority is to mobilise those who can work with new types of weapons that are being transferred to Ukraine by Western partners: “First of all, we are mobilizing personnel in certain accounting and military specialties”.
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine has been the cornerstone of Russian disinformation about the country since the very beginning of the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests, when it was used to discredit the pro-European popular uprising in Kyiv and, subsequently, the broader pro-Western shift in Ukraine's foreign policy. Accusing Ukrainian officials of Nazism and fabricating a connection between them and Nazi Germany is one of the favorite techniques of the Kremlin and pro-Kremlin outlets. Read more in our previous analysis Nazi east, Nazi west, Nazi over the cuckoo's nest.
Learn more about the reasons behind the Kremlin's obsession with framing Ukraine as a Nazi state in the EUvsDisinfo analysis titled "Why does Putin portray himself as the tamer of neo-Nazism".