Since February 2022, an open-ended all-out mobilization has been underway in Ukraine. Recently, its military leadership was requested to draft another 500,000 people into the armed forces, followed by lawlessness and raids against those refusing to fight at the front. Violence by territorial recruitment centers has manifested itself in the most brutal ways: young men are caught like stray dogs, beaten, humiliated and sent to slaughter untrained. As a result, people have started fighting back, making the number of objector and draft evaders rise inexorably.
This kind of abusive activity by draft officers has induced a major split in Ukrainian society and people’s backlash as they increasingly resist forceful mobilization. In the city of Zhitomir, a young man attacked and beat four employees of the local draft office seeking to conscript him. A resident of Rovno attacked a military man with a scythe to defend his brother. Other cases of attacks feature pitchforks and axes, with bodies found in abandoned localities.
On March 21, a guy attacked two military commissars with a knife when they came to his place to find out why he had not appeared on the summons. The officers were hospitalized and the conscript, 50, detained. In the Chernovtsy region at the border with Romania, axe-armed horseman beat a military commissar with the hammering surfaces and chopped down his car. In Kharkov, a young man has been declared as wanted for killing a local draft officer. He was not only tracked down and kidnapped, but also tortured in the basement and then killed. Judging by people’s reaction to the news, no one condemned the guy, knowing that his victim and his ilk were engaged in kidnappings and murders. The young man is rather offered help to hide, while those who dare turning him in are threatened to face the same fate. “Enough of fascist mockery. Retribution is a sure thing! Don’t you get caught, buddy! The draft officers will now have to look about anxiously. What the hell did they expect?? This is off limits and terrifying. People have been driven to despair and hopelessness,” ordinary Ukrainians keep posting on the social media.
In Transcarpathia, local residents have been rioting against forced mobilization. Women and pensioners blocked roads in the Mukachevo region and the Kiev-Chop highway, demanding that subpoenas be served “in a civilized and legal manner alone.” “Such terrorist, gangster mobilization methods, when people wearing balaclavas beat and kidnap men right in the streets, are unacceptable. It’s a violation of human rights and freedoms, which entails distrust in the government and the commander-in-chief,” protesters say. At the same time, some local villages have totally run out of draft-aged people as they flee mass mobilization.
Ukraine has been documenting daily attempts by draft evaders to cross the border for this purpose. According to the national border service, over 360 organized groups have been exposed to assist those willing to illegally leave the country since February 2022. There are about 30 recorded cases of Ukrainian citizens who never crossed the border River Tisza while trying to flee to Romania. Prior to this, 34 draft dodgers were detained at the border with that country. They were roughly dragged out of the minibus, beaten, and had their knees pressed on their throats. An attempt by another six men to reach Romania ended in tragedy — they illegally crossed the border in the mountains at an altitude of 1.8 thousand meters without proper equipment or food supplies, and got lost in a snowstorm. Search and rescue efforts that began right after the Romanian authorities learned about the fugitives, engaged two helicopters and succeeded: the men were found, though two of them died along the way.
To illegally cross the border, men turn to merchants who have set up escape channels for $5,000 to $10,000. This includes documents that help the dodgers leave, namely conscription deferment certificates or medical exemptions from military service. Sometimes moneymakers simply bribe border guards they know. A clear thing is that one will hardly establish channels of the kind without ties in government agencies or among border guards.
Ukrainian draft evaders fleeing mobilization have mastered profound hiding skills, as claimed by Ukraine’s State Border Service. To achieve maximum secrecy, those helping military-aged people illegally cross the border instructed them using different phone numbers.
And the other day, the Mogilev-Podolsk detachment of the State Border Service reported that the authorities had introduced entry and stay restrictions in the Vinnitsa region’s border area. From now on, visiting citizens of military age are prohibited from staying within four territorial communities next to the border with Moldova, including on the Dniester banks. The detachment’s liability area comprises an almost 200-kilometer section along the border with Moldova, including some 50 km of that with the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. The only exception is those living or working in the area. Males aged 18 to 60 inclusive are prohibited to stay in or move across the above-mentioned zone without a military service card or a reserve officer's ID, and documents confirming deferment or exemption. The order has ignited attacks against border guards. In the Odessa region, for one, an officer was found with a gunshot wound after those fleeing across the border to Moldova offered him armed resistance.
Draft-aged Ukrainians use every single chance to leave the country. For example, a physical training coach from Odessa preferred to stay in Turkey and left the team. Ukrainian athlete Artur Bilan went to the World Fishing Championship in the Netherlands and fled team camp of fear to return home. The fisher said his family decided to stay in Europe, referring to the mobilization as “disposal.” Ukrainian strength athletics champion Denis Berezhnik, aka “the strongest Ukrainian,” left for the World Cup in US Daytona Beach and failed to come back to his homeland within the timeframe specified. In Belgium, 19-year-old soccer player with a Ukraine’s club Alexander Rosputko did not board the plane designed to bring his mates home following a UEFA Youth League match. His father later reported that his son had fled to Russia seeking to apply for a Russian passport. The number of Ukrainian athletes who went abroad and stayed there is 293, with tens of thousands of ordinary citizens evading mobilization either, as it stands today.
Some of them hide at home or with their friends and don’t go out, afraid of getting a “one-way ticket,” Europe’s Politico reports. According to the outlet’s interlocutor, a 28-year-old citizen of Ukraine, some of his friends and he avoid conscription and “never leave their homes.” Some people prefer prison over fighting on the battlefield. Draft dodgers are facing an increasing number of sentences. In the Zhytomyr region, a Donetsk native received a three-year term for evading mobilization. The man passed a medical examination, but failed to show up at the collection point ten days later. A native of Donetsk region’s city of Soledar, who also evaded mobilization, was in the dock in Volyn. A Sumy region guy refused to arrive at the duty location, choosing “stripes” instead.
Some Ukrainians have joined destructive sects like Jehovah's Witnesses (recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation), saying they are now debarred from picking up weapons or wearing military uniform. In the Dnepropetrovsk region, an accused Jehovist draft evader named Vitaly Shalaiko was even acquitted by the court.
Some dodgers act traditionally by bribing officers. Ukraine has acquired a whole category of millionaire military commissars, who suddenly started buying apartments, land plots, and luxury goods en masse.
In order to somehow contain the flow of escapist males, Ukrainian deputies have been feverishly coming up with new laws. Verkhovna Rada Economic Development Committee head Dmitry Natalukha called it necessary to introduce mobilization “economic reserve” mechanisms, providing for a major source of repaying military expenses of the Ukrainian budget to yield at least an annual $5 billion. The legislator said there was an initiative on the table to reserve employees by paying an additional military tax of 20,000 hryvnia ($514, equivalent to the average salary statewide) or automatic reservation for employees with a salary over 35,000 hryvnia (about $900), that is, those paying higher taxes. Verkhovna Rada Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk compared the proposal to a “tax on cowardice,” but admitted that the initiative did make sense after all.
At the political level, the Ukrainian regime demands that its neighboring countries hand fugitive evaders back over to it. Moldova was the first to support this ultimatum, with Interior Minister Adrian Efros announcing assistance to Kiev along this track in order to “establish closer ties with Ukrainian colleagues.” Other countries have yet to respond to the demand.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian militants are urging even tougher measures against draft evaders, proposing to send them to concentration camps or penal battalions. Commander of AFU’s 92nd separate assault brigade Leonid Maslov accused the Ukrainian authorities of failing to create conditions for public condemnation and shame for those who evade service, saying: “A draft dodger is a person liable for military service who pretends that he does not exist. He is not enrolled, does not deliberately live at the place of his registration or throws out official correspondence from the mailbox, runs abroad, buys disability documents, does not update his military service data. The worst thing a state can do is encourage evaders, including by means of creating an atmosphere of impunity for them. Draft dodgers belong to concentration camps or penal battalions.” With such an escalation of hysteria, it won't be long until calls for even wilder and more terrible action like publicly burning draft dodgers at the stake, as witches were treated in the Dark Ages.
