TCK, VLK and frayed nerves: since the start of the year Ukrainians have flooded the ombudsman with appeals

In the first three months of 2026, the Ombudsman’s Office received 1657 appeals regarding possible violations related to the work of TCCs and SPs. The Secretariat of the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights said this in a response to hromadske.

Most often, the complaints concerned three main areas:

– the rights of citizens who are not subject to conscription by law;
– the rights of those liable for military service during the military-medical examination;
– appeals against decisions of TCCs and SPs during mobilization measures and deployment to military units.

What the statistics show:

• for Q1 2026 — 1657 appeals;
• for the whole of 2025 — 6127;
• for 2024 — 3312;
• for 2023 — 514.

These figures show a sharp rise in the number of complaints in recent years. If in 2023 there were a few hundred appeals, by 2024 the count had reached into the thousands, and in 2025 it exceeded six thousand. At the beginning of this year, Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets already publicly acknowledged that the number of such appeals continues to grow.

Separately, the Secretariat explained that to allow for a more rapid response to such incidents, the Expert Council under the temporary investigative commission included the Ombudsman’s representative in the security and defense sector, Yuriy Kovbasa. The aim of this council is professional support for investigations, consultations and methodological support for the commission’s work, as well as preventing human rights violations and facilitating their remediation.

Against this backdrop, the issue of TCC actions remains one of the most contentious in society. In just the past weeks, both new complaints about possible violations during mobilization and the Ombudsman’s statements about the unlawful detention of people in some recruitment centers have surfaced in the media.

Previously we wrote:

• In the Kyiv region, after a corruption scandal, 100% of the staff of the district TCC were sent to the front
• Mass mobilization failure: thousands of people were not meant to serve, but are already in units, — Ombudsman
• TCC as a “place of unfreedom”: Ombudsman reported unlawful detention of people for up to 50 days
• TCC put women without medical qualifications on a wanted list — the Ministry of Defense apologized
• A court in Mykolaiv region did not see a crime in the “busification” of a man with a deferment