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.
