You're reading: Lawyers fight for aid for relatives of soldiers who die after discharge

Over 300,000 Ukrainians have served in the military since Russia unleashed war in the Donbas three-and-a-half years ago.

Of them, at least 2,700 soldiers and officers have been killed – hundreds in the bloody battles of 2014 and 2015, when the fighting was at its peak, and many more since the war settled into stalemated trench warfare. More than 10,000 others have been wounded.

But there is another toll that remains uncounted – the thousands who have suffered from sicknesses and disease since being discharged from the army. Hundreds of them have died, sometimes only weeks after returning from the war, from illnesses that were a direct result of their military service.

But because they were not serving members of the armed forces at the time of their deaths, their families are not entitled to full compensation from the Ministry of Defense.

Falling ill

Tamara Kovalenko, a mother of four living in the town of Zgurivka some 80 kilometers east of Kyiv, was widowed when her husband Mykhailo Kovalenko, a former soldier of the 43rd Artillery Brigade, died just weeks after he had been demobilized.

Mykhailo Kovalenko worked as a driver before the war, and was among those called up in February 2015.

“After conscription, he spent a couple of months in a boot camp near Kyiv,” his wife told the Kyiv Post in a recent interview. “Then they were sent to the war zone in the spring. He did not like talking a lot about his life and service there, I didn’t even know exactly where he was deployed. However, there were terrible troubles with food and clothes in the unit. I had to mail him aid parcels twice a week, and the whole town raised money for that.”

In October 2015, after several months of service, Mykhailo visited his family on a short leave.

He started falling sick soon after he got back to the front line.

“One day he called and told me he had a temperature of almost 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit),” Tamara says. “And he had to stay on guard duty. There was no one free to replace him. He kept going to the military hospital in Pokrovsk, a town 50 kilometers to the northeast of Donetsk, with no tangible results. Some used to tell him: ‘Don’t moan – it’s a war, everyone’s got a fever here.’”

One day in February 2016, he eventually found himself unable to get out of bed in the morning, and he lost consciousness soon after. He was evacuated to the hospital in Pokrovsk, then to the city of Dnipro, and finally ended up in the intensive care department of the main military medical center in Kyiv.

“Even in the Kyiv hospital, they could not break the fever,” Tamara says. “After a while the left-hand side of his body became paralyzed. Soon he started suffering from a terrible headache that was so painful that he sometimes knocked his head against the wall.”

Dismissed

While Mykhailo was being treated in the capital, his army unit did not inquire about his whereabouts, Tamara says. His officers found him only in early May 2016, when it was time for them to demobilize conscripted soldiers. Mykhailo was dismissed from the army in his absence, and his wife was simply given his papers.

From that moment on, he was a civilian again.

He was discharged from the military hospital with the first – the most serious – category of disability. A commission of military medical experts officially acknowledged that the former soldier’s sickness have been caused by his fulfilling duties to defend Ukraine.

Tamara brought her paralyzed husband home in the hope he would recover together with his family. But Mykhailo died from brain inflammation in early July 2016, just two months after he was dismissed from the army amid sickness. He was just 27.

Three months later, in September 2016, his family received some Hr 300,000 ($11,200) in compensation, but only for the disability Mykhailo suffered at war. The Ministry of Defense declined to pay any compensation for his subsequent death.

The compensation payment for a serviceman killed in the line of duty was Hr 800,000 ($30,000) at that time. Tamara is now battling the Defense Ministry in the courts for proper compensation.

However, the prospects of her getting it are slim.

“Ukrainian legislation lacks decent regulations for cases like this,” Viktoriya Lavrenyuk, a lawyer at the Legal Hundred non-profit organization, which provides free legal support to Ukrainian war veterans and their families, told the Kyiv Post.

“If a veteran dies after being dismissed from service due to an injury or an illness, his or her family does not get the legal status allowing for a number of privileges, such as discounts on utility payments, monetary aid, or recreation and healthcare benefits.”

Amendments

To close this legal loophole, activists of the Legal Hundred non-government organization, in cooperation with lawmaker Igor Lutsenko, in March and April filed three draft bills proposing amendments to Ukraine’s law on social security for servicemen and their families.

Only between 2014 and 2016, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense issued as many as 10,084 certificates that servicemen had sustained injuries or contracted diseases while defending the Motherland, according to the explanatory notes to the bills.

However, even having papers, the families of deceased veterans still find it very difficult to get assistance from the government.

“The three drafts that we filed stipulate that if a former soldier dies either within three months, 12 months, or 18 months after being discharged, the family is entitled to a full, one-off financial aid payment, and other benefits,” Lavrenyuk said. “We’re calling for the passing of the third draft bill with the 18-month period, because for it provides the best possible social security for those whose loved ones were taken away by the aftereffects of war.”

As of Oct. 10, the proposed amendments have yet to be included on the Verkhovna Rada’s agenda for debate.