Zelensky announced the dismissal of all those responsible for conscripting the military into Ukraine due to corruption.

The President decided Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday dismissed all those responsible for military conscription in all parts of the country.

“Illegal enrichment, legalization of illegally obtained funds, illegal profits, illegal forced transfer to the other side of the border. Our solution: we dismiss all military commissars,” Zelensky said via Telegram.

Zelensky said 112 criminal investigations were opened after investigations by Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies, security services and the prosecutor’s office.

“There are violations in different regions. Donetsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, Odessa and Kiev,” he added. He asked Supreme Commander-in-Chief Valery Zalushny to replace the dismissed officers with veterans of the war that Russia had started.

“The system should be run by people who know what war is and why bribery and wartime indifference are considered high treason,” he said.

He said that military conscription should be organized for “soldiers at the front or those who cannot stay in the trenches because their health does not permit it or they have become disabled”.

He promised to punish officials accused of corruption and called on others to “go to the front” if they want to “keep their medals and protect their dignity”.

At the end of July, Ukrainian authorities announced the arrest of a former commissar in the army responsible for the mobilization process, on suspicion of buying a villa in Spain for four million euros during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Fighting endemic corruption in Ukraine, which was one of Europe’s poorest countries before the Russian invasion, was one of the EU’s conditions for saving Kiev’s candidacy.

Since the beginning of this year, two high-profile scandals have been exposed by the country’s anti-corruption authorities.

In May, the chief justice of the Supreme Court was arrested and jailed in a $2.7 million (€2.5 million) corruption case. In January, the military supply case prompted a series of resignations in ministries, regions and the country’s judiciary.

France 24/AFP