An army of homeless people. The problem of settling military near the front is huge
I would like to inform the general public about another problem at the front: soldiers have nowhere to live.
The prices for houses and apartments in the frontline areas are such that they can be eaten by combatants and cannot be compared to any elite region of Ukraine: not to mention Lviv and Kyiv! They ask for 20,000-40,000 UAH for an ordinary village house with no water, where no one has lived (probably disgusted) for years – this is, unfortunately, the norm.
Moreover, a significant number of landlords openly refuse to rent to the military on the grounds that they are military. But this does not cause any public outcry or days of discussion on social media. The military are being chased like lepers, they are being asked three prices – and the military endure.
Of course, there are opposite exceptions. There are patriots who offer free accommodation. There are local communities that have organized work to help military personnel with accommodation. But these are exceptions. In general, the state and local governments ignore this pain of the veterans .
Similarly, the military vertical does not deal with this problem properly. If a military unit commander has the will, he tries to do something. But in principle, the actual system in the army does not provide for such a duty. Soldiers' problems with accommodation are solved by the soldiers themselves.
But in today's environment, the old regulations are no longer relevant! The old system provided for the military to live in a centralized location, for example, in kindergartens, schools, or other public institutions. But with the development of long-range weapons, this backward practice cost the Ukrainian people thousands of lost military lives and the budget billions in compensation to the families of the victims. (And by the way, we should now regularly audit whether commanders are concentrating personnel or are not guided by old statutory requirements? But this is a separate painful topic)
That is why we need to disperse, to live in groups – no more than a compartment. This is a requirement of the current conditions of war, not a whim.
Are there many military units where their leadership (all those ATOs, CMAs, etc.) facilitates the immediate resettlement of personnel? Many commanders are concerned about this when they have a lot of other tasks on their plate?
At the same time, there are probably millions of square meters of housing sitting vacant nearby. No one is thinking of handing them over to the military. These are the apartments and houses of those who fled to the Russians or went abroad to live with the Europeans. They cannot be touched!
As soon as someone from the military occupies such housing, they are surprised to discover that there is a local police force in the area that protects sacred private property.
It's getting to the point of being anecdotal. The author of these lines has acquaintances who fought for a settlement whose northeastern edge had already been attacked by Russian infantry. At the same time, when they tried to occupy a house in the western part of the town, a district police officer (!) arrived under fire to inform them that such unauthorized occupation was prohibited.
As you may have guessed, the Russians later occupied the village, along with all the surviving real estate (to be fair, sometimes the police assisted, but it was rather contrary to the adopted procedures).
The saddest thing is that the legal framework for security actually exists, but no one wants to use it.
The Law "On the Legal Regime of Martial Law" explicitly provides for such a thing as housing obligation. All citizens of Ukraine can be obliged to accommodate military, police, and refugees.
This law, if applied, will solve the problem of flats once and for all.
It's just that leaders at all levels don't want to take any responsibility for using it, and will come up with stories about insufficient mechanisms to implement the document's provisions.
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