In the new campaign that will try to get more people to join the defense of Ukraine, those interested are attracted by being able to choose which position they will hold and which unit they will belong to, reports Reuters. They also get to decide how long they will be in service.
– The people who will defend our country now are not those who chose defense as a career: they are civilians. And civilians are used to being able to choose, Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Natalia Kalmykova said in an interview.
The campaign is visible on social media, on job application pages and on billboards. In the streets, Ukrainians are met with calls to help defend their homeland, and video clips show how a tractor driver trades the farm for battlefields and armored vehicles. “Everyone can do it!”, is the message in the films.
According to David Bergman, PhD in psychology at the Norwegian Defense Academy, these types of campaigns can have an effect. But the most important thing when it comes to recruitment is that the communication clearly shows what the military stands for and fights against. And he believes that giving people the opportunity to be more involved in their service is positive.
– The needs must rule, but the greater the individual participation, the better. You have to have the right person in the right position and make use of the individual’s skills. Then not everyone can get what they want, says David Bergman.
The risk with this type of freedom of choice, however, is that the recruits will be unevenly distributed, defense analyst Jörgen Elfving points out.
– You can get a large influx to certain units where the managers have a good reputation, for example. And when it comes to choosing a position, it is not certain that you have the natural prerequisites for what you choose. There is a risk of the wrong person in the wrong place, he says.
Photo: Andriy Andriyenko/TT
Ukraine has also established around ten new recruitment centers where volunteers can join the military. The goal is for there to be 30 of these by the middle of the year, according to Reuters.
The country is large need to mobilize more to their forces. Earlier it was said that upwards of 500,000 soldiers had to be recruited, but these figures have since been written down somewhat.
Earlier this spring, the country voted through a new mobilization law that will come into effect next month. It makes it easier for the military to determine who can be called up and removes the time limit for service. This in order to be able to mobilize more.
There are also others methods that Ukraine can use to attract more people to the forces, but as far as Jörgen Elfving knows, the country has not used any of these. It could, for example, be about giving a higher salary or benefits when you have finished your service.
– If you look at Russia, the soldiers receive almost astronomical salaries compared to others in the country, he says.
Whether this particular campaign will be effective cannot be said yet. Oleksiy Bezhevets, an adviser in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told Reuters that this is not a “magic pill”, but that the need for personnel is so great that it does not matter much which positions the volunteers choose.
A survey from February carried out by the Ukrainian analysis company Info Sapiens shows that only 35 percent of the men in the country are ready to join the defense.
– Somewhere, at some point, we lost trust. Now our task is to renew it, Oleksiy Bezhevets told Reuters.
