Demobilisation, higher salaries and changes to enlistment offices: how the authorities plan to reform the army
Ukrainska Pravda
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On 1 May 2026, President Volodymyr Zelenskyyannounceda new stage of army reform. Hestatedthat salaries would be increased for all military personnel, a new system of "combat" contracts would be created, and clear timeframes for service would be introduced.
The president's statement comes with a sense of déjà vu.
Zelenskyy promised demobilisation for military personnel back in late 2023, and government officials set out fixed terms for service in a draft law updating the mobilisation rules. But on the eve of the final vote in parliament, the military command asked parliamentarians toremove the demobilisation provisions from the bill. Why? So as not to cripple the front by releasing over a hundred thousand soldiers at once.
This is only the first step towards what's been billed as a "major transformation" of the army. The pool of reformers includes representatives of the Defence Ministry, the General Staff and the President's Office.
Ukrainska Pravda has learned how Ukraine's mobilisation system may change; what terms and conditions are to be included in the new contracts; who will be able to leave military service; what changes are set to be made to the system of payments for carrying out combat missions; and what the next step in army reform will be.
Important clarification: the proposals described in this article have not yet been incorporated into any draft laws or government resolutions. We have summarised the most up-to-date work by the Defence Ministry, the General Staff and the President's Office. However, the drafts are being amended almost daily, so some of these points may never make it into the final documents.
The new demobilisation
"There is no consensus on fixed terms for service," a source in the President's Office told Ukrainska Pravda in mid-April 2026. "The General Staff is against this. The military leadership's position comes down to this: if there were large-scale demobilisation, the staffing of the army would be significantly reduced."
Mobilised soldiers will be able to sign a contract guaranteeing demobilisation and a deferment until their next call-up, while contract soldiers will be able to renegotiate their agreements with the state. Previous service will not count towards the new contract. But it will affect the length of the deferment, which is planned to be calculated individually.
"There will still be the option not to sign a contract," one official familiar with the details of the proposals made by government officials and the command told Ukrainska Pravda off the record. "But contract soldiers will have clear lengths of service: 10 months for current military personnel in combat positions; 14 months for new recruits applying for combat positions; and two years for all other roles – from UAV pilot to media officer [this applies to both current military personnel and new recruits – UP]. In addition, they will be able to choose their own positions – both combat and rear-line roles."
The plan is to increase the minimum salary for military personnel serving in the rear from UAH 20,000 (around US$455) to UAH 30,000 (US$683) per month. Salaries for commanders at various levels are to be roughly doubled.
Soldiers who sign the so-called "combat" contracts will be paid significantly more.Government officials and the military leadership are proposing to introduce 10/20/40 risk-based remuneration.
"UAH 10,000 (US$227) per day for being at the position. UAH 20,000 (US$455) for assault and search operations [retaking lost positions,mop-upoperations]. UAH 40,000 (US$910) for active offensive operations. On average, an infantryman who regularly carries out combat missions will be getting UAH 250,000-400,000 (US$5,700-9,100) per month," explains an Ukrainska Pravda source who is involved in developing the army reforms.
"We will set a maximum cap on payments to prevent abuse."
Payments under the 10/20/40 system will accrue to soldiers on the basis of the orders issued by the commanders of their military units.
10/20/40 risk-based remuneration
Photo: Andrii Kalistratenko, UP
The next stage of army reform is a reboot of the enlistment offices (known as Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Centres).
Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainians have sent ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets nearly 12,000 complaints concerning violations of their rights in the course of mobilisation, the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights told Ukrainska Pravda. The lion's share of the complaints about the actions of enlistment offices have been filed over the past two years.
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Photo: Andrii Kalistratenko, UP
In January 2026, Zelenskyy instructed the new defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, to address the issue known as "busification" – the controversial practice of forced mobilisation in which recruitment officers detain men in public, oftenbundlingthem onto minibuses to transport them to enlistment offices.
Ukrainska Pravda has learned from sources in parliament that the Defence Ministry team proposes to transform the enlistment offices into "Reserve+ Offices" with separate units: recruitment offices and support service offices.
Staff at the recruitment offices will be responsible for keeping records of people liable for military service, planning mobilisation measures, recruiting, and processing people for military service. Additional recruitment points will also be set up in public spaces.
There will be recruitment hubs in separate premises to accommodate volunteers and military-age men brought in by police while they go through the procedure of joining the army. The Defence Ministry envisages that staff at the hubs will carry out document checks, military medical examinations, and assessments of psychological resilience and professional aptitude.
Staff at the support offices will be responsible for what are known as social services. Military enlistment offices aren't only involved in mobilisation: they also have to deal with a host of social issues, from processing compensation for wounded soldiers and one-off payments to the families of fallen defenders, to organising funerals. This part of their work is often neglected because they are overloaded with mobilisation-related tasks.
The support offices could take over all social functions. The Defence Ministry wants to digitalise some of these, such as processing payments and issuing certificates.
The advantages of the changes are obvious: decentralisation and a clearer distribution of the workload between structural units. But there are some details to be worked out. First, premises need to be found and equipped. Second, more staff need to be recruited – a time-consuming and expensive process.
"Enlistment offices are a vast structure that provide the army with 30,000+ mobilised personnel and contract soldiers a month. No one wants to break the system, so there are a lot of discussions going on," a source in the military leadership told Ukrainska Pravda off the record. "There was a long debate over who should bring men from the street to the enlistment offices. The Defence Ministry proposed that this should only be done by police officers, without military personnel being involved. But the police are opposed to that. Everything has now stalled – there is no consensus."
Ivan Vyhivskyi, chief of the National Police, makes no secret of his reluctance to take responsibility for street "recruitment". In a recent interview, he stressed that police officers "should not be left" to deal with the mobilisation process alone, as even being involved in it "has a very negative impact on their image".
In fact, under current legislation only police officers are authorised to detain military-age men and bring them to enlistment offices, so the Defence Ministry was not proposing anything new – and it seems strange, to say the least, to claim that the police have a negative image because of their involvement in mobilisation.
Call-up notices can be issued by employers and representatives of local authorities as well as military personnel from enlistment offices.
"But all of them are trying to distance themselves from mobilisation," says Iryna Friz, a member of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security, Defence and Intelligence. "In some places, a village head may say: 'How can I go and issue a call-up notice? What if he's killed tomorrow – how will I look his family in the eye?' Our country will perish [with this approach – UP].
Mobilisation has been placed entirely on the shoulders of servicemen. This is absolutely wrong. In my opinion, the military should only take responsibility after a mobilised person or contract soldier has arrived at a training centre. Notification and transportation to basic military training should be handled by civilians."
There are currently no deadlines for when the enlistment office reforms will begin. Representatives of the Defence Ministry, the General Staff and the President's Office are still "refining" and "fine-tuning" their concepts. The end result should be a draft law.
And as the experience of the last initiative to update the mobilisation rules (in 2024) has shown, its passage through parliament could drag on for months, and the final version of the bill may differ significantly from the original.
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"We began the reform with fixed terms for service, because uncertainty is what frightens people who are considering military service the most. Once we've done that, we'll move on to changes at the enlistment offices. Coercive methods of bringing people into the army are unacceptable. We will try to make mobilisation fair. The changes will take place within this year," a source involved in developing the reforms assures Ukrainska Pravda.
The introduction of contracts with the option of demobilisation will give soldiers certainty, which is critically important in a protracted war. Clear lengths of service combined with financial perks could even motivate civilians to join the army voluntarily.
But can a reform be considered fair if it involves resetting the previous period of service from the moment a contract is signed – both for those who have been serving continuously since 2022 and for those who only recently joined the Defence Forces? Hardly.
Where will the money for the new "combat" contracts come from? A source of Ukrainska Pravda's in the military leadership insists that the Ministry of Finance supports the initiative, but provides no specifics.
However, the bill amending the 2026 state budget, which the government approved and submitted to the Verkhovna Rada on 8 May, provides for no additional spending for increasing military salaries.
As Ekonomichna Pravda has reported, citing sources in the government and parliament, raising payments to soldiers would require at least UAH 60 billion (around US$1.4 billion) by the end of 2026. But this is not the final figure, as the final concept of the new contract system has yet to be approved.
Ultimately, will the authorities manage to implement the changes they've announced this time? Two years ago, for many servicemen and women, demobilisation became nothing more than a pipe dream.
"If those at the top have decided to go back to setting clear lengths of service, they must see it through to the end rather than feeding the military empty promises. Otherwise the number of soldiers going AWOL will break every record," one combat officer told Ukrainska Pravda.
He joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. When, or if, the reform takes effect, the countdown to his demobilisation will only begin after he signs a new contract.
