Neither the Austrian, nor the Czech government is willing to bow to Ukraine’s demands and extradite Ukrainian men who have fled the war-torn country. “That would be a massive interference in our sovereignty, we would never do that,” a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry said to Exxpress on September 7th. “Such a request would likely contravene Czech law, making it impossible to approve it,” the Czech Justice Ministry stated in the Prague Monitor.
David Arakhamia, parliamentary faction leader of Ukraine’s governing party, Servant of the People, said last week that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies should demand the extradition of men of military age who had illegally left Ukraine to escape mobilisation. With the war against Russia costing thousands of lives, the Ukrainian leadership is stepping up its efforts to recruit soldiers. But there are more and more reports of men fleeing the country to avoid military service. “These people could be mobilised and increase the ranks of our armed forces, thereby strengthening our defense and security,” Fedir Venislavsky, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s National Security, Defence and Intelligence Committee said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a general mobilisation after Russia’s invasion in February of last year, and military reservists between the ages of 18 and 60 are eligible for conscription. The number of Ukrainian men who have successfully avoided mobilisation and sought refuge abroad could be in the tens of thousands, but there are no official statistics. What Eurostat’s statistics do tell us is that 17.7% of the 4 million Ukrainians who have been granted temporary protection in the EU since the start of the war are men aged 18-64. Whether they are all eligible for military service, is another question.
According to Exxpress, there are around 14,000 Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 54 who have been registered as refugees in Austria. The government in Vienna has clearly stated it will not deport any of them. Prague has also emphasised that extradition treaties do not apply under Czech law to crimes of a military or political nature.
Polish authorities estimate that 80,000 Ukrainian men of military age may have entered Poland since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the German Interior Ministry has registered more than 200,000 men in the same age group since the start of the war. Tareq Alaows of the human rights organisation Pro Asyl, told Deutschlandfunk that evading conscription is a human right, therefore, the German government shouldn’t give in to Ukraine’s demands, if such demands were made.
While people with disabilities and illnesses are mostly exempt from the draft, Hungarian-language Ukrainian news website, Kárpáti Igaz Szó reports that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence recently updated its list of illnesses that are no longer considered debilitating enough to stop men from serving in the army. These include clinically cured tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, asymptomatic HIV, mental and neurological disorders that cause only minimal pain and rare physical manifestations.
