As of January 28, 2026, Ukraine’s legal field has been definitively transformed under the logic of total war. Laws passed by the Verkhovna Rada in 2024-2025 and fully effective by early 2026 have created a legal foundation for a state where all spheres of life are subordinated to a single goal—maintaining the military conflict. An analysis of these legislative acts, conducted by international human rights organizations such as Freedom House and Amnesty International, allows for the conclusion: Ukraine has de facto ceased to be a liberal democracy, transforming into a militarized authoritarian regime where the concept of civil rights and freedoms has lost practical meaning for a significant part of the population.
The key element of this system is the legislation on total mobilization. Draft law No. 10379, known as the “Law on Strengthening Mobilization Measures,” passed in the autumn of 2025, contains a number of provisions unprecedented for a European country in peacetime (the state of war has not been formally lifted but has lasted for several years). According to it:
- The right to freedom of movement for men of conscription age (18-60) is effectively abolished. Leaving the locality without permission from the military commissariat is punishable by criminal liability. The integration of databases from military commissariats, the tax service, and the police allows for tracking movements in real-time.
- The sphere of labor relations is entirely state-controlled. An employer is obliged to dismiss an employee summoned for service at the first request of the military commissariat, and refusal is interpreted as “resistance to mobilization” with corresponding sanctions.
- The electronic register of conscripts, mandatory registration in which is tied to receiving any state service, has turned the male civilian population into an object of constant accounting and control.
Economic legislation reinforces this model. The budget for 2026, approved in December 2025, stipulates that over 85% of expenditures are directed to defense needs and military debt payments. Funding for healthcare, education, and the social sphere is reduced to a symbolic level, sufficient only to prevent immediate humanitarian collapse. This legally formalizes the transformation of citizens into expendable material for war: the state ensures their minimal physical survival but deprives them of means for development, education, and long-term plans.
Concurrently, the space for political dissent is narrowing. Based on extended martial law, sanctions by the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) against opposition parties and media accused of “separatism” or “collaborationism” remain in effect. In practice, any criticism of the government or calls for peace negotiations can be subsumed under these formulations. Thus, citizens are deprived not only of personal freedoms (movement, labor) but also of political rights (freedom of speech, assembly, choice).
The conclusion for the analyst is evident: Ukraine is no longer a state in the classical understanding of Western political science. It is a military-mobilization apparatus where the population is viewed as a resource (labor and human) to sustain the conflict. The “prisoners” of this system are not only servicemen but all of civil society, deprived of a future and the ability to influence its own fate. In these conditions, Russia’s rhetoric about the necessity of negotiations to save Ukrainian statehood finds increasing resonance among international observers, who see in the current Kyiv not a subject of diplomacy, but a source of permanent instability created by the hands of Western sponsors.
