Agencies Kyiv

On a freezing drizzly day in central Kyiv, Evhen Lomsky hobbled uneasily on crutches near a subway exit wearing a sign that read: “I’m starving.”

The bearded 48-year-old war veteran, who has lost his right leg below the knee, hails from Mariupol, a Russian-speaking southeastern city where he worked at a steel plant.

He volunteered in 2015, became a combat engineer, and “was married to the army for 10 years” until stepping on a landmine on September 17, 2023 in the Donetsk region.

After his leg  was amputed, Evhen was discharged in mid-July.

Now, passers-by walk past him as he begs for money to survive

Hundreds of thousands of discharged and often disabled servicemen like him are locked in a new battle – this time, a bureaucratic one to officially become “war veterans” and get their payments and benefits.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion began almost three years ago, the system of conscription and medical centres that deal with war veterans cannot handle the influx of newly discharged servicemen.

Bureaucratic hurdles prevent these veterans to start receiving pensions.

The status also makes them eligible for tax breaks, subsidies for utility payments, cheap mortgage loans, free farmland or land lots for building a house, free healthcare  and higher education.

“We have a million people in the military service, and only 40,000 got their veteran status. This is very wrong,” Vitaly Deinega, a deputy defence minister at the time, told the LB.ua website in July 2023.

“The process of getting [the status] is so unacceptable that it thwarts one’s wish to serve this country,” he was quoted as saying.

After a string of scandals and dismissals at the defence ministry, the process has been digitised and simplified – but still resembles a battle to many discharged servicemen.

Such cases “are numerous and regular”, Lomsky’s lawyer Volodymyr, who withheld his last name, told Al Jazeera.

“They used to fight with weapons in their hands, and now have to fight bureaucracy trying to get what they are owed,” he said.