The unemployed in Ukraine will be sent to the front, according to a false narrative disseminated by Russian state media. In reality, the government in Kyiv wants to attract people who have lost their jobs into the process of rebuilding the Ukrainian infrastructure, part of a project symbolically called the “Recovery Army”.
NEWS: “Residents of Ukraine who have lost their jobs will be mobilized, says a press release by the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine. According to the source, for the time being they will be enlisted in the “Recovery Army”, which will deal with the repair and construction of the infrastructure destroyed as a result of military actions [...] It should be noted that at the moment the level of unemployment in Ukraine is around 30%", Ruskaia Vesna (Russian Spring) portal reads.
“All the unemployed in Ukraine will be sent to the front”, Mikola Azarov, the PM of Ukraine when the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych was president, wrote in a Twitter post, quoted by pro-Kremlin media and Russian Telegram channels.
NARRATIVE: The unemployed in Ukraine will be drafted and sent to the front
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: Starting from a Twitter post by former pro-Russian Prime Minister of Ukraine Mikola Azarov, who fled to Russia after the outbreak of the military conflict in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, pro-Kremlin media and Telegram channels in Russia shared a false narrative about the Ukrainian unemployed being sent to the front.
If Azarov is trying to convince the public opinion that the unemployed will be sent to the front by the Ukrainian Government, the press writes that “for now” they will be enlisted in the “Recovery Army”, implying that they will be sent to the conflict zone later.
The propaganda narrative makes the most of the name of the Ukrainian government project “Recovery Army”, which is not a military unit. The Ukrainian Minister of Economy, Iulia Sviridenko, has stressed that it’s a non-military structure : “At the moment we have two armies in the country - the first is defending the country on the front, and the other is working”. The Ukrainian minister has stressed the fact that no one will be forced to participate in this project, and those who will work will benefit from remuneration at the level of the minimum wage in the economy.
Taking into account the manipulations launched by the pro-Kremlin media on this topic, most of the Regional Military Administrations of Ukraine have published on their official pages explanations regarding the functioning of this governmental project. The Ternopil Regional Administration, for instance, writes that in Sumy people will clean the riverbeds and do repair works in various buildings, and in Chernihiv, the works will focus on the redevelopment of landfills and the repair of social spaces. These regions are far from the frontline, and the works described are not military activities. According to the Government's explanations, participation in the “Recovery Army” is not mandatory, and under art. 43 of the Constitution of Ukraine, forced labor is prohibited even if martial law is declared.
