Gambling in the Ukrainian army sparks controversy

LETTER FROM KYIV

It took just a few hours to collect the 25,000 signatures required for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to examine the petition. The story goes back to Friday, March 29, when unit commander Pavlo Petrychenko drew the president’s attention to the havoc wreaked on Ukrainian army soldiers by online gambling sites. That same evening, Zelensky stated that he had commissioned several of his agencies to measure the extent of the phenomenon. On April 2, took the matter further after receiving “instructive” reports: “We are preparing corresponding steps which will increase control over the industry and help to protect the interests of the society.”

The intensity of the words used in Petrychenko’s petition had a strong impact on the Ukrainian population. In it, the commander of a drone unit in the 59^th brigade described a situation in which, for some soldiers, these games represent “the only way to cope with stress,” as they have been away from their families for over two years “without the possibility of full rest, so they are especially psychologically vulnerable .”

He reported that some servicemen would spend “all their money on games” and take out microloans, thus putting themselves and their families in a “debt hole.” The officer even mentioned instances where soldiers pawned “drones and thermal imagers, thereby harming not only themselves, but also their fellow citizens.”

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Petrychenko also expressed concern about the risk of a “direct threat to the national security of our country,” given that “many Russian online casinos target Ukrainian consumers in order to gain access to personal data of military personnel and other citizens.” At the end of his letter, he asked President Zelensky to “submit an urgent bill” that would ban gambling for military personnel and limit the industry’s ties with the army.

His petition has been the subject of much comment on social media. First, there have been those who have praised the importance of such a move and shared their own stories on X, like @lucky__soldier, an anonymous soldier. On March 29, he claimed that a former sergeant in his battalion who was addicted to gambling had borrowed a total of 500,000 hryvni (€11,800) from soldiers under his command. Opposition MP Oleksiy Goncharenko, meanwhile, claimed on his Telegram channel that “nine out of ten soldiers on the front line” have suffered from problems with addiction to online gambling sites.

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On the contrary, other soldiers qualified these assertions. Commander Stanislav Bunyatov, who is very popular on Telegram, said he didn’t know “where that idiot [MP Goncharenko] got his statistics.” While he acknowledged that he had had “a few cases of fighters” under his command whom he and his men had convinced to transfer their wages to their wives’ or mothers’ bank accounts, he said the majority of problems with addiction concerned soldiers in the rear units “who play with their pay because they have nothing to do.”

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