Cabinet Resolution #555 of April 29, 2026

Who is affected: service members, the Ministry of Defense, law enforcement agencies, the Security Service, the State Guard Administration, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Administration of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection.

Summary:

  • the resolution establishes that all service members — mobilized and contract service members — receive personal hygiene items once, according to the approved list, from the moment they are entered into the personnel lists of a unit or training center;
  • such issuance is one-time for the entire period of service, except in cases separately defined by the procedure;
  • monetary compensation for the cost of hygiene items if a service member refuses to receive them is prohibited.

What is right:

The provision formalizes something that, in practice, should have existed from the first day of the full-scale invasion, but had not been defined in bylaws as a guarantee rather than as the goodwill of a particular commander or volunteers.

This is especially important for women in the military, whose specific hygiene needs were long either ignored or covered exclusively through volunteer efforts. Linking issuance to the moment of inclusion in the personnel lists is the right decision, because a person must receive what they need immediately, not after weeks of administrative coordination.

What is wrong:

One-time issuance for the entire period of service, regardless of its duration, is conceptually questionable. Hygiene items are consumables, not equipment. A person serving for one or two years objectively needs them to be replenished regularly.

The wording “once for the entire period” is either a technical error or a deliberate minimization of the state’s obligations. The rule on the absence of monetary compensation in case of refusal is administratively understandable, but it does not resolve the situation where a person refuses the issued set because it does not meet their actual needs.

Alternative solution:

The issuance of personal hygiene items should not be one-time, but regular — monthly or quarterly — which corresponds to the nature of these goods. It would also be appropriate to introduce a mechanism for replacing unsuitable items from the list with alternatives of equivalent value, so that the rule works for real people with different needs, not only on paper. Finally, monitoring of the implementation requires a separate mechanism: the experience of previous years shows that even formally defined guarantees of material support are often implemented unevenly depending on the specific unit and commander.

What happened:

The resolution is an indicative provision in the context of broader work on the gender adaptation of military legislation. Personal hygiene items are finally becoming a guaranteed element of material support, not an item of humanitarian aid.