A New Office Takes Shape

Ukraine formally activated a Military Ombudsman office in October 2024, when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Olha Reshetylova to the position. An ombudsman is a government official who investigates complaints from citizens and monitors whether institutions are following the rules. This new office operates separately from the existing human rights commissioner and focuses specifically on protecting the rights of active soldiers, reservists, local defense volunteers, resistance fighters in occupied territories, and law enforcement officers involved in combat.

The creation of this office capped off years of legislative work. After the appointment, Zelenskyy met with Reshetylova to discuss ongoing problems in protecting soldiers' rights, according to the President's official website. The meeting showed that the government was paying early attention to the new office's work, though the details of what they discussed weren't made public.

What the New Law Does

The law that created this office lays out its structure in detail. The Military Ombudsman is appointed and dismissed by the president — which means the office reports to the executive branch. However, the law also requires the office to submit a public annual report on its activities to both the President and the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament) by March 30 each year, according to Kyiv Post.

That dual reporting requirement matters. When an ombudsman submits a report to parliament, it becomes a public record that lawmakers, civil society organizations, and international observers can examine and question. The March 30 deadline also gives Reshetylova's team a defined window to show it can do its job credibly.

The office does more than just take complaints. It is building an analytical center that will study the root causes of violations — looking at patterns rather than just individual cases — and then feed those findings to military leadership so they can fix systemic problems. This two-part approach — handling individual complaints while also identifying larger structural issues — is similar to how ombudsman offices work in Finland or Denmark. It suggests the office aims to change how institutions operate, not just document problems after they happen.

Where This Office Fits in Ukraine's System

Ukraine already had human rights oversight in the defense sector before this law passed. The Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights had established a dedicated department focused on monitoring rights in the defense and military sector. That department has worked on issues like military medical commissions — where officers decide whether soldiers are fit to serve or eligible for disability benefits — and has found procedural violations in those assessments.

Now Ukraine has two separate bodies overseeing soldier welfare. The Parliamentary Commissioner's office answers to the legislature; the Military Ombudsman answers to the president. In theory, both offices could handle complaints about the same issues. In practice, they will need to develop clear systems for sending cases to each other — a standard procedure that mature ombudsman systems typically document through agreements rather than laws. How smoothly this coordination works will be worth watching.

The Scale of the Challenge

The Military Ombudsman will face substantial caseloads. Data from the Parliamentary Commissioner's office during 2022 — the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion — shows what kinds of issues dominate: 51 percent of defense-sector cases involved freeing prisoners of war and finding missing soldiers; 21 percent concerned protecting active soldiers' rights and their families' rights; 16 percent involved missing or illegally detained civilians; and 12 percent covered veterans and former service members, according to the Commissioner's 2022 report. These numbers predate the Military Ombudsman's existence, but they show the workload awaiting the new office.

The prisoner of war cases are particularly complex. Reshetylova participated in a presentation examining how Russian forces have violated prisoners' rights to healthcare — an issue international observers have documented. This engagement places her office within the broader effort to document violations that may later be used for accountability, even though the Military Ombudsman's formal role is focused on Ukraine rather than international law.

There is an important historical pattern here. When countries emerging from war or fighting an active conflict create human rights monitoring bodies, those bodies often serve two purposes at once: they handle complaints for the government's immediate domestic accountability, and at the same time they create written records that international courts and truth commissions later rely on for investigations and prosecutions. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, for example, drew heavily on files that national ombudsmen and parliamentary commissioners had compiled for their own countries' purposes. Ukraine's Military Ombudsman may follow that same pattern, whether or not it explicitly plans to do so.

Structural Pressures to Watch

An ombudsman who is appointed and dismissed by the president creates a potential problem that experts in government accountability worry about. If an ombudsman can be removed by the executive, there may be pressure — real or just feared — when findings point to decisions made by military leadership. The law requires annual reports to parliament, which provides some protection, but parliament's ability to act on those reports depends on the broader political situation. During wartime, martial law constraints limit what legislatures can do.

The decision to include resistance fighters in occupied territories adds another practical difficulty. By definition, these fighters operate in areas where the Ukrainian government has little or no control, making it hard for any office to independently verify what is happening or investigate complaints. Whether the office's analytical center can gather information from occupied regions — likely through partnerships with nonprofits and testimony from evacuees — will be an early test of how much reach the office actually has.

The inclusion of reservists and local defense volunteers reflects the reality of Ukraine's wartime mobilization. Since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Ukraine has repeatedly expanded its mobilization system, and the number of people with legal claims against the military has grown substantially. Many of these individuals came from civilian life and don't know how to navigate military bureaucracy. An ombudsman office that is accessible to this broader population — not just career military — would genuinely expand who can seek accountability.

Looking Ahead

The first annual report, due by March 30, will be the clearest test of whether the office has real power and ambition. How detailed is the analytical center's methodology? How many types of complaints does it handle? How specific are its recommendations to military command? The answers will determine whether this becomes a genuine institution that fixes problems or simply a well-designed structure that accomplishes little.

For defense and human rights experts watching Ukraine's governance trajectory, the Military Ombudsman's development will be worth following — not only because it reveals whether Ukraine can maintain legal accountability over its armed forces while fighting for survival, but because it may offer lessons, positive or cautionary, for other conflict-affected countries trying to do the same thing.