Ukrainian soldiers spent 400 million hryvnia ($9.6 million) daily on online casinos in 2023—more than the entire nation donated to its Armed Forces that year.
Ekonomichna Pravda, citing National Bank data, reported that total military gambling hit 12 billion hryvnia ($288 million) monthly while citizen donations reached just 46 billion hryvnia ($1.1 billion) annually.
Junior Sergeant Pavlo Petrychenko saw the crisis firsthand. His March 2024 petition warning that soldiers were pawning drones and thermal imagers to cover gambling debts gathered 25,000 signatures in a single day.
Petrychenko died defending Donetsk Oblast on 15 April 2024—two weeks after registering his appeal. President Zelenskyy posthumously awarded him the title of Hero of Ukraine and enacted restrictions on military gambling.
Nine months later, Ukraine still can’t enforce those restrictions. The crisis threatens national security, creates intelligence vulnerabilities, and puts Ukraine’s post-war recovery at risk as debt-trapped veterans return to civilian life.
When presidential decrees hit legal walls
Zelenskyy’s April 2024 decree banned military personnel from gambling sites, but military commanders have no legal authority to add soldiers to Ukraine’s registry, restricting gambling access. Ivan Rudiy, head of the Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (KRAIL), told Glavcom the order contains a fatal flaw.
“Solving the problem requires giving military leadership the right to propose including specific service members in the Registry during martial law,” Rudiy explained. “However, this requires amending the Law on State Regulation of Gambling Activities.”
As of 24 July 2024, Ukraine’s self-restriction registry contained 8,257 people—99% who voluntarily banned themselves, with 81% choosing the maximum three-year restriction.
The registry grew sixfold after KRAIL launched an online application form in July 2023, jumping from 367 registrations in the first half of 2023 to 2,200 in the second half.
But voluntary self-restriction can’t address soldiers whose addiction has progressed beyond self-awareness.
National security meets personal catastrophe
“Gambling takes advantage of this vulnerability by deliberately targeting military personnel, using Armed Forces symbols in online casinos,” Petrychenko wrote in his petition. He warned that Russian online casinos accessing Ukrainian soldiers’ personal data created national security threats alongside financial devastation.
One Border Guard fighter told Kyiv Post that systematic gamblers comprised “up to 10 percent” of his unit, though participation increased during major sporting events. Ivan Zadontsev, press officer for the Aidar battalion, told AFP about one soldier who won 2.5 million hryvnia ($60,000) only to gamble it away immediately.
“He believed he could win even more—and that’s why he lost everything, down to 400 hryvnia,” Zadontsev said.
Military psychologist Andrii Kozinchuk noted that frontline troops earning substantially above civilian wages face particular vulnerability to gambling’s appeal. “You feel as if you’ve discovered a new source of income and will continue to earn money,” he explained regarding the serotonin rush that drives addiction.
The addiction follows soldiers into recovery. Iryna Sysoyenko, president of the All-Ukrainian Association of Physical Medicine, Rehabilitation and Balneology, wrote in Ukrainska Pravda that rehabilitation centers see soldiers continuing to gamble during physical recovery.
“We face a very serious task,” she acknowledged. “Treatment protocols for gaming addiction are still being developed in research centers worldwide and differ significantly from protocols for chemical dependencies.”
Racing to build an infrastructure
KRAIL blocked nearly 2,000 unlicensed gambling websites in 2024 and negotiated with Meta and Apple to remove gambling advertisements and unauthorized apps. The regulator wants to conduct a national sociological study targeting military personnel and veterans as respondents. Still, Rudiy acknowledged that “conducting such research is significantly complicated by Russia’s full-scale armed aggression.”
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Ukraine is building a long-term financial literacy infrastructure.
From scratch.
In 2025, the country introduced “Entrepreneurship and Financial Literacy” as a mandatory subject for 8th graders, expanding to 9th grade in 2026. The National Bank’s TALAN Center created curriculum and textbooks as part of Ukraine’s National Strategy for Financial Literacy until 2030.
But current soldiers never received such an education. They now navigate sudden wealth without tools to manage it, while Ukraine races to develop treatment protocols that don’t yet exist globally.
A drop to the ocean
Against this industrial-scale crisis, volunteers distributed 4,000 financial literacy books to military units in 2025. Soldier and theater director Kyrylo Lukash, who coordinates the Cultural Forces initiative built on their 2023 “Book to the Front” program, explained that service members themselves selected titles, including “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman and “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George Clason.
“Soldiers with call signs Banker, Financier and similar chose the books,” Lukash said. The initiative operates through gatherings of 10-20 people with lectures and performances, followed by individual conversations.
PrivatBank partnered on the project and assigned a former platoon commander to deliver financial literacy presentations, offering peer credibility.
Sysoyenko emphasized the urgency of developing proper treatment: “We must research international experience, develop appropriate methods and protocols, engage specialists, and most importantly—adapt methods to our needs, our reality, and our people.” She noted that in the United States, gambling disorder prevalence among veterans reaches 10.7%.
Stakes beyond individual soldiers
Veterans carrying gambling debt into civilian life threaten Ukraine’s post-war economic recovery. This is the threat Petrychenko died trying to prevent: debt-trapped soldiers become vulnerable to Russian intelligence exploitation, turning personal financial crises into national security liabilities.
Ukraine must simultaneously fight a war, treat combat trauma, and build addiction infrastructure from scratch—a challenge no nation has successfully navigated at this scale.
Petrychenko’s warning received 25,000 signatures. The response was 4,000 books—a well-meant but tiny gesture against a crisis in which soldiers gamble away more than their nation can donate to defend itself.
