Researching veterans policy issues is not a new topic for the Agency for Legislative Initiatives, and the need for its effective development and implementation is more relevant than ever for Ukraine. Therefore, the ALI continues to work in this area. In particular, on February 19, we held a meeting with representatives of the German Society for International Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, GIZ).
We shared our thoughts and visions on the Ukrainian approach to working with veterans — which aspects need to be revised and which procedures — improved. We focused separately on the importance of developing a comprehensive veteran policy and discussed the challenges and specifics of its implementation, in particular:
- forming a legislative framework for veteran policy;
- developing a network of veteran support assistants;
- involving local businesses in supporting veterans;
- the capacity of local authorities to integrate veterans;
- the suitability of services to the needs of veterans and the capacity to provide them.
ALI already has systematic experience in this area, including a comprehensive Shadow Report on the Study of Invisible Veteran Policy for 2014–2022, in which ALI experts described the entire cycle of veteran policy — to understand whether it is possible to create a policy that will be able to truly solve the problems of veterans, and what systemic mistakes were made earlier.
The ALI educational project, the Ukrainian School of Political Studies (USPS), also ran the ‘You Are Important’ training programme in 2024. More than 30 servicewomen and female veterans participated in the first cycle of the programme.
The meeting was attended by Svitlana Matviienko, Executive Director at ALI, Volodymyr Skrypets, the Analytics Lead at ALI, Oleksandra Egert, Deputy Executive Director for Operations and Project Coordination, Sebastian Schlebusch, Head of the InClude Component EMPOWER Project (GIZ), and Oleksandr Khoruzhenko, GIZ Ukraine Project Advisor.
