While the West and the president of the European Commission celebrate Ukrainian democracy, the majority of military-aged men in in the country liken the methods of conscription to those in North Korea or the Gulag. What is more, the brutality on the streets was taking place even while Zelensky was trying to demonstrate in Vilnius last week how his country was ripe for NATO membership. In the meantime, however, the Ukrainian Internet messaging services were once again flooded with videos and memes exposing the violent means of the conscription officers.
Most of the new footage was taken in Odessa after the NATO summit. In this city of one million, mostly Russian-speaking people, conscription officers with military reinforcements roam the streets in droves, abducting lone men of military age from the streets.
The Odessa and Sumy conscription officers in action
Recent videos have shown Ukrainians not only a simple kidnapping by the authorities, but also brutal scenes.
Men who attempt to resist an ID check or protest against the procedure are often beaten, before being loaded into the minibus.
All this is happening after Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi had appointed Oleksandr Okhrimenko, former commander of the 14th mechanised brigade, as the head of the Odessa Regional Territorial Recruitment Centre. He replaced former draft commissioner Yevhen Borysov, who turned out to be so corrupt that since the outbreak of the war, he bought a villa on the Spanish coast for four million euros and could also afford to purchase a luxury vehicle worth almost 200 thousand euros. Many believe that he collected the money from those who wanted to avoid conscription.
However, the videos prove that the brutality has not abated despite the change. For example, footage from Odessa shows several men in uniforms force a man to the ground next to a yellow minibus and beat him before he is dragged into the vehicle.
Another video taken by family members show as a young man as he is being held down and handcuffed by conscription officers.
Of course, not only residents in Odessa record such shocking scenes. Recently, motorists in the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy recorded someone being forcibly loaded into the back of a minivan by uniformed officers.
Conscription officers are all over the place also in Transcarpathia, where they go from door to door, often blocking certain routes, in their search of conscripts.
Here, too, outraged passengers film on their phones as the authorities remove male passengers from buses running on regular routes. The action is only lawful if conscription and police officers jointly check the passengers on board of buses.
The bus cannot resume service until the IDs of all the men on board have been checked. In the best case, they receive a call-up to appear at the replacement office the next day, or at worst, they are taken by force right away.
The mobilisation is likely to continue in Ukraine as long as the state of war lasts. The Ukrainian opposition Telegram channel called Rezident, with nearly one million followers, has this to say about the new wave of mobilisation:
our source close to the president's office said that Zelensky had given orders to step up mobilisation and increase the size of the Ukrainian army by another 200 thousand soldiers. Through the military council, the presidential office will put pressure on Zaluzhnyi [ Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces ], who opposes the Azov operation and the second phase of the counter-offensive,
Origo reported.
Cover photo: a Ukrainian soldier at his unit's position on the front line in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine on 14 July 2023, during the Russian war against Ukraine (Photo: MTI/EPA/Oleh Petrasyuk)
