In 1814, he resumed his education. He graduated in 1817 from the "Korpus kolonnovozhatykh", a school established by General Nikolay N. Muravyov in his home to train staff officers, and was commissioned as an ensign ("praporshchik") in the army. (While still a student at the "Korpus", he wrote an arithmetic textbook that was published in 1817.) He was posted to the Second Army at Tulchin in the southern Ukraine and assigned to work on a topographical survey of Bessarabia, a region in which he would spend the next twelve years and one which figures prominently in his work. Tulchin was the chief center of the Southern Society of the Decembrists and several of the officers who were later arrested were his friends, but there is no evidence that Veltman sympathized with the revolt.