What Brutal Forced Conscription Really Looks Like in Ukraine

In EU-candidate Ukraine, street abductions have become an everyday occurrence. Those who dare speak out are threatened by the secret service. Despite this, resistance is growing — particularly from Ukrainian retirees and women, who are increasingly standing up to the masked and armed recruitment squads.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (left), and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (Photo: AFP)

The confrontation escalated into physical violence, with a conscription officer getting punched and the abducted man eventually freed. The mostly elderly women in the crowd cheered: “Well done!”

But not everyone in Kharkiv was so lucky. 

One man was violently forced into a police car in the courtyard of an apartment block. Of course, the police—who swore to protect the people—won’t be heading to the front lines. They’re shielded by Zelensky.

It’s a dirty gentlemen’s agreement: you protect the corrupt regime as a cop, and the corrupt regime protects you. Meanwhile, Mykola, who has never touched a weapon in his life, is sent to the meat grinder.

Jozsef Sebestyen of Berehove (Beregszasz) wasn’t lucky either. He was hunted down in front of a local school—the same one visited two years ago by Zelensky himself, who had promised local ethnic Hungarians that their rights would be guaranteed. Well, they’ve been “guaranteed” alright — in true Zelensky fashion.

Transcarpathia's Hungarian community is full of men like Jozsef Sebestyen. Like him, many now have no rights left — no right to their language, to education, or even to life itself. In a country where people are hunted like stray dogs, beaten, tortured, or killed — what more is there to say? And the abductors often do it with sadistic grins. Those who dare to speak out are visited later in the day by the same plainclothes agents who, just that morning, had blocked city traffic for the anthem.

Cover photo: Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (left), and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (Photo: AFP)