Two battalions of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army (UVA) are officially demobilizing after fighting at the contact line in the Donetsk region for over four years. The announcement came from Dmytro Yarosh, the UVA’s commander since its founding in 2015.
“The 5th and 8th separate battalions of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army are leaving the contact line, but we are not abandoning the war,” Yarosh announced in Dnipro in mid-October. According to the Minsk agreements, the UVA’s soldiers were supposed to have left the contact line three years ago.
The UVA is a volunteer military formation whose members have been fighting on the contact line since the start of the war in 2014. In spite of ongoing attempts by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to integrate volunteer battalions into the regular army, the UVA remains legally ambiguous. The direct participation of volunteer soldiers in fighting with the subdivisions of the regular army is not regulated by Ukrainian law, Ukrainian Armed Forces representatives told Hromadske.
Hromadske traveled to the base of the 8th separate battalion of the UVA outside the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol a week before the demobilization announcement. We report on what life is like for a volunteer soldier, how the fighters imagine demobilization, and why they don’t want to officially enlist in the Ukrainian Army.
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