It is no exaggeration to say that Transcarpathia in 2024 is once again haunted by the ghost of 1944. Back then, the Soviet invaders rounded up tens of thousands of ethnic Hungarian and German men for forced labor, and today local men, regardless of their ethnicity, are forcibly taken to a war that they have nothing to do with. What is striking, however, is that Kyiv is conducting a regular manhunt in Transcarpathia with a mixed population, and similar coercion only takes place in Chernivtsi with a significant ethnic Romanian population or in Russian-speaking Odessa. The question is why? Are we witnessing another chapter in the policy of displacement?
It is public knowledge that unlike in Transcarpathia, similar cases do not take place, for example, in Kyiv, and men dare to go out into the streets.
Masked and armed commandos from inner Ukraine regularly "make guest appearances" in Transcarpathia. Most recently, men of military age were picked up from the historic center of Uzhhorod (Ungvar).
Of course, they are not only "raiding" the streets of Uzhhorod, but also those of other cities. In Berehove (Beregszasz) and Vynohradiv (Nagyszolos), they have recently rounded up everyone they found on the streets. Local reports claim that somebody was beaten half to death for resisting the unconstitutional procedure, or, to put it simply, kidnapping.
Warning shots fired in Vynohradiv
In the area surrounding Vynohradiv, recruiters picked up several men of draft age from the local Roma community, but they did not expect this to spark a small-scale uprising. It turned out that they rounded up not only healthy young people, but even men who were known to be ill, were collected from a local market. The Roma community wasted no time and attacked the recruitment center in Vynohradiv. Recruiters firing warning shots can be clearly seen and heard in the videos.
The outraged women, along with their children, built a roadblock in front of the center, using whatever they found nearby, from tires to corrugated slates.
After the protest, the Transcarpathian Regional Police issued a statement saying that the protesters could face up to seven years in prison. Interestingly, the Ukrainian authorities did not deny the Soviet past in this case either. In Russia, it is still customary for the security services to compel perpetrators to publicly apologize, which is recorded on video. . This is what happened also in this case. The women had to apologize in front of the cameras and say that they didn't really mean it. They did this on the Telegram channel of Vitaliy Glagola, a blogger from Uzhhorod who openly and proudly works with the Ukrainian services:
So this is how Ukraine, aspiring for EU membership, obliged the humiliated Roma in Transcarpathia to apologize to the public. Fortunately, they were not compelled to approve the kidnapping of their loved ones. The question arises: where are the human rights activists, the NGOs and others in such cases? The answer is still to come.
Cover photo: Relatives of Ukrainian soldiers demanding demobilization demonstrate on Maidan Square in Kyiv on October 27, 2023 (Photo:MTI/EPA/Sergey Dolzhenko)
