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An injury that costs a service member their reproductive function is one of the risks of this war, and the state has answered it with a guarantee: Law No. 3496-IX, adopted on 22 November 2023, gives service members the right to have their reproductive cells collected and stored free of charge. The law came into force on 14 June 2024, but there was no money for it in that year’s budget. The programme only began in practice once the Cabinet of Ministers approved the procedure on 24 January 2025 — Resolution No. 78 — with UAH 190 million allocated for the year. It covers not only the armed forces but also personnel of the State Emergency Service, the police, the special operations directorate of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the State Criminal-Executive Service who take direct part in hostilities or serve in combat areas. Those who have already frozen material at their own expense can apply to the clinic and have it stored free of charge from now on.
The procedure has three steps: a medical examination, carried out on the referral of the unit commander; collection of the cells, on an electronic referral from a gynaecologist or urologist and at the service member’s own request; and cryopreservation and storage under Order No. 787 of the Ministry of Health.
In the article I set out the practical questions each step raises. A referral is normally a written instruction from a doctor on a standard form, yet a commander is neither a medical professional nor the holder of such forms — the point of routing it through the commander is probably to let the service member leave the unit under martial law and to prove to the clinic which category the patient belongs to, but that should be written into the procedure much more clearly, with a formal referral template annexed to Resolution No. 78. There is also no legal mechanism for entering a commander’s referral into the electronic health system, so clinics have no clear way to be paid for the examination. And requiring a commander’s referral sits uneasily with the right to privacy protected by international instruments and Article 301 of the Civil Code of Ukraine.
What happens after a service member dies needs far more detailed regulation, and the difficulty is not only legal: the subject touches on delicate moral and ethical questions. Resolution No. 78 provides for three years of free storage from the date of death, after which storage may continue at the expense of a person named in the deceased’s will or, where there is no will, at the wish of the spouse or the partner with whom they lived as a family. Two problems follow. Ukrainian law does not clearly treat reproductive cells and embryos as either objects or subjects of law, so their legal status is undefined. And the resolution goes further than Law No. 3496-IX, which allows continuation only by a person named in a will — a subordinate act may not contradict the law it rests on. In my view a will is in any case the wrong instrument here: what should pass is not ownership of the material but the right to use it in assisted reproduction, and that right is a personal non-property right, which under Article 1219 of the Civil Code cannot form part of an estate.
Until a proper mechanism exists, the widows of the fallen have to go to court. Draft law No. 10450, which would let a person decide the fate of their stored cells in the event of their death, was adopted in first reading but has seen no movement since March 2024. The programme itself is an important step towards securing the right to biological parenthood; making it work needs clear procedures, co-operation with healthcare providers, and service members who know what they are entitled to.