Ukrainian lawyers who left the country during the full-scale invasion earn money by advising on how to evade mobilisation in Ukraine during the war. Slidstvo.Info and its colleagues from Army TV, posing as clients, consulted three such lawyers and received advice, some of which openly violates the law. For example, lawyer Taras Nykyforchuk advised to throw away the military uniform during training and jump over the fence of the training centre. Yurii Demchenko said that he had ‘his people’ who could take a person being mobilised right from the training centre. Lawyers working in Ukraine believe that such advice encourages Ukrainians to break the law.
This is discussed in the Slidstvo.Info story. The video has English subtitles.
YURII DEMCHENKO
Yurii Demchenko has the most ‘tempting’ offer for those wishing to evade mobilisation. His package of services includes on-site visits of lawyers and ‘his people’ who, according to him, can get a person out of any military commissariat in Kyiv. A one-time consultation costs 100 euros.
Yurii Demchenko
According to the legend, Yurii Demchenko received a call from the wife of a person liable for military service who ignores the need to update his information, but the woman wants to be able to talk to the Territorial Recruitment Centre and get her husband out in case of emergency. At first, Demchenko advises her to be polite, but not to sign anything. Later, he gives more controversial advice.
‘You can fake an illness, like a heart attack: let him fall to the ground, lie down, scream: ‘Call an ambulance!’. And let the ambulance come and take him away,’ the lawyer advises.
If this does not work, Demchenko advises calling lawyers. He is abroad, but offers the services of colleagues from his law firm. The price ranges from USD 500 to USD 1,000 and depends on the time the specialist has to spend with the ‘client’.
And that is not all. If things are really bad, Demchenko advises to call him, and he will call his ‘people’.
‘I have people who go and pick up cases individually. It’s just more expensive than a lawyer’s visit. This is a case in which he was taken away for no reason at all, by some stupid TCC people,’ Yurii suggests.
The lawyer does not say who these people are or the exact price of the service. He says this is not information for a telephone conversation.
After the consultation, Slidstvo.Info sent a request to the lawyer as a journalistic inquiry, asking how he left Ukraine and whether he considered his consultations unethical. Yurii Demchenko ignored the question.
TARAS NYKYFORCHUK
Taras Nykyforchuk is a successful blogger with over 900,000 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of video views. For at least the last 2 years, all of them have been about mobilisation, the TCC, bad government and frankly false intimidation.
Taras Nykyforchuk
A consultation with Taras Nykyforchuk costs UAH 2,000.
Slidstvo.Info asked Leonid Matsievsky, a soldier from Army TV, to call this lawyer as a client.
Leonid says that he wants to leave Ukraine and will definitely do so after he gets a disability certificate for his mother. In response, the lawyer sends him documents for him to process on his own.
Later, Leonid says that he decided to call because he was worried – his friend had recently been drafted right off the street. So the lawyer decides to give advice to his client’s friend as well.
– He has to jump over the fence and throw away his uniform…
– Is it possible to do that? Like, will there be any consequences?
– Yes, you can, if everyone did that, then the war would be over.
According to the Slidstvo.Info sources, Taras Nykyforchuk left Ukraine at the end of 2022 as a father of three minor children, but according to the journalists, he has only one minor child.
Slidstvo.Info asked Nykyforchuk how he left Ukraine and whether he considered his consultations unethical. The lawyer ignored the journalists’ questions.
KATERYNA KOLPAKOVA
Kateryna Kolpakova is another lawyer who gave a consultation to journalists posing as clients. Or ‘Instamama in law’, as she calls herself.
Kateryna Kolpakova
According to the legend, she is approached by a taxi driver, Andrii, who would like to “make a deal” to go abroad. The man assures her that he has the right contacts and can get into the Shlyakh system, but he doesn’t really understand how to go about the paperwork.
‘Instamama’ is much more cautious than the previous interlocutors. Kateryna does not advise against grossly breaking the law by running away or pretending to be sick. However, she says that it is possible to refuse the mobilisation order and use the time until the proceedings are opened to flee abroad. This is a criminal offence, the lawyer warns.
She, by the way, also mostly lives abroad — she posts photos and videos on her social media of her walks on a volcano in Tenerife (Canary Islands), her holidays in Georgia, or her life in Poland.
Instamama also did not respond to journalists’ questions about the legality and ethics of her advice.
HARM FROM ADVICE
All the consultations of the mentioned lawyers contained advice on how to evade conscription, which is a criminal offence (Article 336 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine ‘Evasion of conscription’).
Slidstvo.Info asked two regulatory bodies to comment on such actions of the specialists: The National Union of Advocates and the High Qualification and Disciplinary Bar Commission of Ukraine. Both bodies ignored the journalists’ request, so the agency asked other lawyers to assess the actions of their colleagues.
‘The advice to evade mobilisation by jumping the fence and running away directly violates the law and the rules of legal ethics, which prohibit advising to commit a crime. Such attorneys are not thinking, firstly, about the consequences for clients and do not act in the interests of clients, and secondly, they greatly damage bar credibility,” explains Artem Krykun-Trush, attorney at law, partner at Miller Law Firm.
