LETTER FROM kyiv
A few hours were enough to collect 25,000 signatures, the threshold necessary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to consider the petition. The case dates back to Friday March 29. That day, unit commander Pavlo Petrychenko drew the attention of the head of state to the devastation caused by online gambling sites on soldiers of the Ukrainian army. The same evening, Mr. Zelensky claimed to have commissioned several of his services to measure the extent of the phenomenon. On April 2, he returned to the charge after receiving reports “instructive” : “We are preparing appropriate measures that will ensure the necessary control of the industry and help properly protect the interests of society. »
The seriousness of the words used in Pavlo Petrychenko’s petition had a strong impact on the Ukrainian population. The commander of a drone unit within the 59e brigade describes a situation in which these games represent for certain soldiers “the only way to cope with stress”even though they have been away from their families for more than two years “without the possibility of properly resting, which makes them particularly vulnerable on a psychological level”.
He thus ensures that” it’s not rare “ that players spend “all their pocket money” in these online games and take out microcredits plunging them and their families into a “debt pit”. The officer even mentions cases where soldiers pawn “drones and thermal cameras, thereby causing harm not only to themselves, but also to their comrades in arms.”
Pavlo Petrychenko is also worried about the risk of “direct threat to the country’s national security”knowing that “many Russian online casinos target Ukrainian consumers to access the personal data of military personnel and other citizens.” At the end of his letter, he asked President Zelensky to submit ” emergency “ a bill to ban gambling by military personnel and limit the sector’s ties to the military.
His petition was widely commented on on social networks. First there are those who welcome the importance of such an approach and tell their own stories on the social network X, like @lucky__soldier, an anonymous soldier. On March 29, the latter claimed that a former sergeant in his battalion addicted to games had borrowed a total of 500,000 hryvnias (11,800 euros) from soldiers under his command. Opposition MP Oleksiy Goncharenko, for his part, assured on his Telegram channel that “nine out of ten soldiers on the front line” would suffer from addiction problems to online gaming sites.
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