Kyiv, Ukraine – On a freezing drizzly day in central Kyiv, Evhen Lomsky hobbled uneasily on crutches near a subway exit wearing a sign that read: “I’m starving.”
The bearded 48-year-old war veteran, who has lost his right leg below the knee, hails from Mariupol, a Russian-speaking southeastern city where he worked at a steel plant.
He volunteered in 2015, became a combat engineer, and “was married to the army for 10 years” until stepping on a landmine on September 17, 2023 in the Donetsk region.
“We were on our way, twilight began,” Lomsky recalled. “I heard a sudden blast and understood that my foot was damaged.”
After stints in several hospitals, where doctors removed shrapnel from his body and amputated his lower leg further for a future prosthesis, Evhen was discharged in mid-July.
Now in the Ukrainian capital, passers-by flowed around him as he begged for money to survive.
Some read the sign with an air of compassion and understanding.
Hundreds of thousands of discharged and often disabled servicemen like him are locked in a new battle – this time, a bureaucratic one to officially become “war veterans” and get their payments and benefits.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion began almost three years ago, the system of conscription and medical centres that deal with war veterans cannot handle the influx of newly discharged servicemen.
Because of bureaucratic hurdles that last for months or even years, the servicemen are unable to obtain their war veteran status in order to start receiving pensions.
The status also makes them eligible for tax breaks, subsidies for utility payments, cheap mortgage loans, free farmland or land lots for building a house, free healthcare and higher education.
“We have a million people in the military service, and only 40,000 got their veteran status. This is very wrong,” Vitaly Deinega, a deputy defence minister at the time, told the LB.ua website in July 2023.
“The process of getting [the status] is so unacceptable that it thwarts one’s wish to serve this country,” he was quoted as saying.
After a string of scandals and dismissals at the defence ministry, the process has been digitised and simplified – but still resembles a battle to many discharged servicemen.
Such cases “are numerous and regular”, Lomsky’s lawyer Volodymyr, who withheld his last name, told Al Jazeera.
“They used to fight with weapons in their hands, and now have to fight bureaucracy trying to get what they are owed,” he said.
After getting the veteran status, ex-servicemen have to push for their access to free healthcare – and often fail.
‘Nobody’s going to care about me’
Shadowed by other developments, such as the forced conscription of Ukrainian men, Washington’s request to lower the fighting age, and the accelerating loss of eastern strongholds to Russian forces, this simmering crisis could haunt Ukraine for years to come.
Disgruntled war veterans may become a formidable political force demanding the benefits the government had once promised to them – but failed to deliver.
“Once I’m out, nobody’s going to care about me,” Dmitry, an ex-infantryman whose legs and spinal column are damaged by an explosion of a massive Russian gliding bomb, told Al Jazeera.
When the 38-year-old father of two was rounding up a month of treatment in a western Ukrainian hospital, he talked to a therapist, also a war veteran, who spoke with him about the intricacies of using specialised codes when applying for further treatment.
Another former serviceman, Andriy Movchun, was a medic who dragged dozens of wounded soldiers from the battlefield and took them to a hospital in the western city of Dnipro.
“So many expired in my hands,” the pallid, dishevelled 44-year-old ex-dentist told Al Jazeera, his eyes dimmed by insomnia, his hands visibly shaking.
Movchun was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and needs to have a malignant tumour removed.
But after months of refusals in Kyiv clinics, he went to Austria, where his mother has refugee status. She negotiated free surgery for him.
But Dmitry and Andriy at least got their veteran status and pensions.
Because of the complicated bureaucracy “many servicemen get discharged without even getting theirs,” a senior clerk in a military unit stationed in eastern Ukraine told Al Jazeera.
“Their unit didn’t submit paperwork on time, or they didn’t have time to run around with all the documents,” the clerk said.
Some servicemen cannot even prove that they were on the front line because their commanding officers failed to mention their stints in obligatory “military action journals,” the clerk said.
On the other hand, many military units employ inexperienced clerks unfamiliar with their filing and reporting systems.
“Lots of barely literate people have been employed during the war,” the clerk admitted.
‘Maximal inconvenience’
Taras, a former serviceman discharged in 2023 after being wounded during a reconnaissance raid, told Al Jazeera that he gave up on his attempts to prove he was on the front line.
“We didn’t document our raids, and now I can’t prove anything,” Taras said.
In Lomsky’s case, the problem began with a simple misspelling of his first name in an incomplete set of discharge papers issued by his A1302 military unit, one of Ukraine’s largest.
The unit does not have an email or a website, does not list its telephone numbers and has not responded to Al Jazeera’s request sent by regular mail.
“I don’t know how this unit interacts with the outside world, but there’s an impression that it is done specifically to create maximal inconvenience,” Lomsky’s lawyer Volodymyr said.
Despite a dozen requests, the misspelling has not been corrected. Suing the defence ministry is the only way to get his status and benefits, he said.
“The commander’s position is, ‘We don’t owe you anything, if you disagree – go to court,’” Volodymyr said.
He said it took one of his clients, a serviceman who got discharged in 2021 after fighting pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine, three years and four trials to get all the payments the defence ministry owed to him.
He said Lomsky has received only one reply from a parliamentary commission on veterans’ affairs that took three months to arrive.
The commission “sent his request to his own military unit so that it investigated itself”, Volodymyr said.
Roman Litvin of Stop Corruption, an anti-graft group in Kyiv that helps war veterans, contacted Lomsky about his plight.
The ex-soldier “feels abandoned”, said Litvin.
His military unit “began to ‘carousel’ him – come later, do this, do that, and he has no leg, he has trouble moving around,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Nobody gave him a road map, he doesn’t know what to do after his wound. He thinks he was robbed,” Litvin said.
The unit’s clerks “are confident of their impunity, that’s why things like that happen”, Lomsky said while standing uncomfortably on one leg and sipping on a coffee a stranger just handed to him.
Since Mariupol is still occupied by Russia, he moved to a village outside Kyiv, where he rents a room from an elderly, disabled man who was irradiated after the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
His landlord “is unwell, he wants me to move elsewhere,” Evhen said.
“But I don’t know where to move, I’m trying to collect money for lodging,” he said – and thanked yet another passer-by who handed him a small banknote.
