Videos of forced conscription in Ukraine have been appearing on the Telegram messaging app in recent days, the Hungarian news portal Origo writes. The brutality of forced conscription in Ukraine has been reported by Magyar Nemzet on several occasions, but now the phenomenon has reached such proportions that the population can no longer ignore it.
In an amateur video from Zaporizhzhya province, for example, a woman told off the recruiting officers for taking away people from the street instead of mobilizing MPs and their children.
Origo writes.
The recruiters even catch Ukrainian men on public transport vehicles. They usually stop the buses and try to drag the men with them. This often ends in a brawl. A video taken in Krivij Rig, the hometown of President Zelensky, shows just that:
But locals often come to the defense of those being taken away. In the video below, a man is filmed from a window in Novoyavirsk, near Lviv, being harassed by recruitment officers. Several of them surround him and refuse to let him go, prompting locals to intervene.
But many are not so lucky and have no one to protect them.
The brutal practice of conscription has also led people to speak out online, especially in light of the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that the war is fought for democratic, European values and that they were not forcing anyone to fight. In the video below, the following quote from Zelensky is edited over the shocking footage:
We are a democratic country and we have a duty to develop. And to defend ourselves. We cannot show examples like Russia, where people are driven to war with sticks! We are not that kind of country. It is paradoxical, we are fighting for European values, we want to become members of the European Union and therefore we have to fight in a way that reflects those values.
Cover photo: Ukrainian soldiers on the front line (Photo: Telegram/Volodymyr Zelensky)
