Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers has decided to introduce a blanket ban on gambling ads in the country in an attempt to combat what it called “the negative consequences of gambling on the Internet.”

This comes only a couple of weeks after another resolution prohibited operators from displaying any military symbols when promoting their products and implementing extra requirements for limiting the transactions and length of playing sessions.

A soldier named Pavlo Petrychenko was at the forefront of a petition in March to introduce stronger online casino regulations during martial law as he claimed that military members were suffering from gambling addiction on a significant scale.

a lot of people turn to gambling as a way to reduce stress

He believes that a lot of people turn to gambling as a way to reduce stress, a trend that members of the US military also recently highlighted. Petrychenko even went as far as describing how some soldiers pawned thermal imagers and drones to finance their habits.

It only took a few hours for the petition to reach the 25,000-vote target to trigger presidential consideration, leading to the country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky banning soldiers from gambling during wartime. The Prosecutor General’s Office also went ahead last month and blocked over 2,500 unlicensed gambling sites from being accessible in the country.