“By distributing ‘Vova’s thousand,’ the government is trying to identify draft dodgers in Ukraine”, – MP says

The program granting each Ukrainian a thousand hryvnias, which has been colloquially dubbed “Vova’s Thousand” by citizens, is an attempt to identify draft dodgers.

This statement was made by Olga Vasylevskaya-Smaglyuk, deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Finance, Tax, and Customs Policy, from the “Servant of the People” faction.

“We have a million men hiding somewhere. They didn’t leave for abroad, they are not people with disabilities, and they are not reserved. These are people who, theoretically, are hiding from fulfilling their constitutional duty to defend the homeland. For example, if a family has two men eligible for mobilization and two women, that’s four thousand hryvnias. Of course, the only way to incentivize them to claim these funds is if the amount is higher than one thousand hryvnias, so it would be three or four thousand hryvnias per family… Some men will register because four thousand is better than two,” said the MP.

In Vasylevskaya-Smaglyuk’s opinion, the second goal of this program, which will cost the state budget 30 billion hryvnias, is to count the population remaining in the Ukrainian-controlled territory.

As of yesterday, more than 3 million Ukrainians had applied for “Vova’s thousand,” as reported by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Earlier, experts warned that receiving this thousand would give the government significant access to an individual’s banking data.