Forced Conscription in Ukraine Escalates into Violence

Anton, 52, was walking home with a friend in Kyiv when he was suddenly apprehended and pushed into the back seat of a police car, flanked by officers. The man, who requested anonymity to protect his identity, had supported Ukraine's war against Russia but did not want to go to the front lines due to his poor health.

He is HIV-positive, suffers from arthritis, and has poor eyesight—conditions he believed rendered him medically unfit for service. However, since the mobilization law took effect in May 2024, Ukrainian recruitment officers have been ambushing men on the streets.

By late January, when he was detained, Anton had limited his outings from his apartment building, fearing both the controversial recruitment campaign and Russian drone attacks on his neighborhood. During one rare excursion, police jumped out of a car parked in a residential garage and chased him.

He was taken to a military section of a state clinic in Kyiv, where his phone was confiscated. “They told me to turn off my phone and hand it over. I started to protest, and the guard said, ‘Don't force me to use force. Give it to me now,’” Anton recounted.

After undergoing medical tests, he was transferred to a recruitment center on the outskirts of the city, where he spent two days in a room with bars on the windows, a bucket of cold pasta, and no way to contact the outside world.

'Busification' – The Street-Conscription Trend

What happened to Anton is called “busification” – men are stopped on the streets, checked for exemption papers, and taken directly to mobilization centers. Observers say the phenomenon is becoming more common as Ukraine's conscription crisis deepens.

Street resistance against recruitment officers has also turned violent, sometimes deadly. In three days in February, one recruitment officer was shot dead at a gas station in the Poltava region; an explosion inside a recruitment office in Rivne killed one person and injured six; another blast wounded a person at a recruitment office in Pavlohrad. Ukraine's Security Service later said Russia had recruited the perpetrator of the Rivne bombing.

At the recruitment center, Anton saw young men just taken from the streets. One man said he had been detained hours before taking his wife to the hospital to give birth to their first child. “There was a strong sense of solidarity. They shared life stories, gave advice and tips for dealing with the guards,” Anton said.

When recruitment officers began assigning men to military units, Anton discovered that his HIV status had been concealed from commanders. When the truth came out, he was deemed unfit for service and released. However, he said he had paid $5,000 in legal fees to get out under a conditional summons, and another $30,000 to brokers who promised to complete his paperwork and then vanished. He is now at home and afraid to step outside.

Background of the Conscription Crisis

In the months following Russia's full-scale invasion, early successes and a wave of patriotism led to hundreds of thousands of volunteers serving. But after the failed 2023 counteroffensive, recruitment became more difficult and measures grew tougher.

Two laws signed in April 2024 lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25, increased fines for draft dodgers fivefold, and removed the provision allowing soldiers to be discharged after 36 months of service, leaving those fighting without a fixed end date.

There are many cases of men being detained in various places. In October 2024, footage outside a concert at Kyiv's Sports Palace showed officers dragging a man across the pavement while onlookers chanted "Shame!" In the western city of Uzhhorod, a man was arrested leaving Sunday mass despite carrying documents proving he was the sole caregiver for his disabled mother.

Corruption in the Conscription Process

Corruption is alleged to be rampant in the conscription process. In some cases, men obtained exemption certificates through paid medical diagnoses. In October 2024, Ukraine's Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned after the press reported that dozens of prosecutors in the western Khmelnytskyi region held disability statuses to evade service.

That scandal was the tip of the iceberg: Ukraine's Security Service said it had canceled 4,106 fake disability certificates issued through corrupt medical examination boards that year and prosecuted 64 officials. In January 2025, the chief psychiatrist of Ukraine's armed forces—a senior member of the central military medical board that decides who is fit to serve—was arrested for illicit enrichment, having amassed properties, land, and four luxury cars worth over $1 million since the war began. Officials found $152,000 and €34,000 in cash at his home.

These alleged practices have drawn international attention. In a memorandum published on July 8, 2025, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights expressed concerns about mobilization practices, including beatings, harsh detention, denial of access to lawyers, and conscription of people with disabilities, citing Ukrainian Parliamentary Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets, who described the violations as “systemic and large-scale.”

This has affected public opinion. According to a July 2025 survey by the Rating Group, only 24% of Ukrainians trust recruitment officers. Telegram groups have begun tracking recruitment officers in real time—a movement so popular that Google's Threat Analysis Group identified a Russian intelligence campaign exploiting it in October 2024, creating fake apps that mapped recruitment officer locations but secretly installed malware.

Attacks on Recruitment Officers Surge

More than 600 attacks on recruitment officers have been recorded since the war began, with numbers nearly tripling in 2025. The first four months of 2026 alone saw 117 incidents—more than 20 times the five incidents in the first year of the war.

Anger has erupted. On July 8, 2026, a crowd in the Sykhiv district of Lviv blocked, damaged, and overturned a recruitment service vehicle while detaining a man wanted for draft evasion, forcing the national police and the Security Service to launch preliminary investigations.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued that the only beneficiary of such scenes is Russia. However, institutions like the Ministry of Defense have admitted that mobilization methods need improvement. Oleksandr Syrskii, who was dismissed as commander-in-chief last month along with Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, also acknowledged that the military is working to correct mistakes and prevent human rights violations at recruitment offices.