Issues with combat pay, salary delays, or lack of funds during treatment — almost any military serviceman may face these problems. At first glance, the situation may look like a conspiracy by the command, but the reality turns out to be less dramatic, yet no less serious. Military lawyer Natalia Reshetnyk, in a comment to RBC-Ukraine, revealed the background of financial delays and explained how soldiers can protect their rights.
The myth of intentional pay cuts
Among the personnel, there is an opinion that the local command intentionally seeks legal loopholes to reduce indexing or "cut" combat pay. However, legal practice shows that the roots of the problem lie in a different plane. According to Natalia Reshetnyk, it is difficult to talk about a conspiracy. Most often, it is about inaction and negligence.
The specialist explains the mechanism of debt formation: "The money does not go out of the officers' pockets. This is simply a negligent story: somewhere they did not check the documentation, did not take into account a document, simply did not count the days, or did not look at the schedules". Often, the commander is to blame for not submitting a report on the actual completion of combat tasks in time.
Ignorance of the law and accounting errors
There can be many reasons for delays. One of the most common is simply ignorance of the legislation regulating payments. We are talking about documents such as the Ministry of Defense Order No. 260, the Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 168, and other relevant acts. Unit financiers sometimes make mistakes in calculations, tying indexing coefficients to outdated data on the subsistence minimum from 2017–2018.
The Supreme Court has settled this issue: the coefficient must change every year in accordance with the current subsistence minimum. This decision has become the main benchmark for the legal protection of soldiers. Lawyers emphasize: indexing of monetary allowance is not a bonus, but a guaranteed payment, the violation of which is grounds for going to court.
Finances during treatment
A separate acute issue concerns payments during long-term or repeated treatment. The legislation (including Resolutions No. 168 and No. 206) clearly stipulates that during inpatient treatment after an injury, a soldier has the right to additional remuneration in the amount of 100,000 hryvnias proportional to the days spent in a medical facility.
However, in practice, it happens that a serviceman comes, and the money for treatment is not credited in the next month. Natalia Reshetnyk points out the reasons: "The military unit either did not receive the hospital discharge in time, or simply does not know that any subsequent or repeated treatment for the primary injury is paid exactly the same amount of 100,000, regardless of when exactly the injury occurred".
When to go to court
If the unit's financial service refuses to credit funds voluntarily, the law allows resolving issues through the courts. There are already many cases where military personnel have recovered significant amounts of unpaid indexing for past years of service through the courts. To effectively protect their rights, soldiers need to understand the internal mechanisms of army accounting and not be afraid to defend their legal interests.
