According to Olena Bondarenko, a lawyer in RELIANCE’s litigation practice, restricting military personnel’s access to gambling during martial law can be considered a security tool to reduce the risks of recruitment, blackmail, and financial vulnerability in the defense sector.
According to Olena Bondarenko, a lawyer in RELIANCE’s litigation practice, restricting military personnel’s access to gambling during martial law can be considered a security tool to reduce the risks of recruitment, blackmail, and financial vulnerability in the defense sector.
Recently, the Ministry of Digital Affairs put forward for public discussion the issue of a mechanism by which military personnel will be checked through the register of persons with restricted access to gambling, as well as through the register of military personnel. If the system confirms a match, access to the game will be blocked automatically, and the organizers will receive only a technical response about the presence of a restriction without disclosing the person’s status.
Olena Bondarenko, a lawyer in the RELIANCE litigation practice, explained that from a legal point of view, such a restriction should not be interpreted as discrimination against military personnel.
«The ban on gambling for military personnel under martial law is a legitimate preventive security measure, not discrimination on the basis of professional grounds. The restrictions are based on the need to prevent the use of addictions by hostile intelligence for blackmail or recruitment, which falls under permissible restrictions on rights under Article 64 of the Constitution of Ukraine,» she noted.
Separately, the lawyer draws attention to the technical side of the future model. She considers it important that gambling operators will not have direct access to information about whether a person is a military person. The system, according to the plan of the Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Ministry of Defense, will only transmit a signal about the presence of a restriction. It is this approach, in her opinion, that allows maintaining the confidentiality of the service and at the same time implementing state control.
In fact, the discussion is now shifting from the question of «whether it is possible to restrict the military» to the question of «how exactly will this work in practice.» The mechanism is still undergoing public discussion, and the state presents it as part of a systematic fight against gambling addiction and protecting military personnel and their families from the risks of gambling addiction.
The topic of banning gambling for the military in Ukraine has been discussed since 2024, but now the authorities have moved on to a practical implementation model through the interaction of registers and digital access verification. That is, this is no longer just a political statement, but an attempt to launch a specific mechanism at the level of the state system.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Yuriy Kraynyak, managing partner and head of the media law practice at Jurimex, believes that restricting military personnel’s access to gambling does not contradict basic human rights and can be introduced by law.
