Ukrainian men are facing mobilisation squads who are claimed to be pulling people off buses or out of bars and dragging them to enlistment centres.
As the war continues with Russia the Ukrainian government is having to find new recruits to fight due to the high numbers of deaths and injured. And it means tougher measures are being employed to find men who are shunning conscription.
Last April, Ukraine lowered its draft eligible age from 27 to 25 due to depleted ranks. The new laws, which did away with some draft exemptions and created an online registry for recruits, are adding around 50,000 troops to the military, said Oksana Zabolotna, an analyst with the Center for United Actions, a government watchdog in Kyiv.
Ukrainian Defense Ministry statistics say the country’s military had nearly 800,000 troops in October. That doesn’t include National Guard or other units. In total, one million Ukrainians are in uniform, including about 300,000 who are serving on front lines.
Conscription has been a sensitive matter amid Ukraine’s growing shortages of infantry and ammunition, which have helped give Russia the battlefield initiative. Russia’s own problems with manpower and planning have so far prevented it from taking full advantage of its edge.
In Odesa there is fear of mobilisation squads were people can be plucked from public areas including bars and transport. And at the main train station in the city an example was where 12 conscription officers arrived and started going through people’s papers to see if they were eligible to fight, reported the BBC.
But most men they found were not able to join up as they were too young or had an exemption and one of the officers called Anatoliy admitted it was not easy to find people. “Some people run away from us. This happens quite often,” he reportedly said. “Others react quite aggressively. I don’t think these people have been brought up well."
But one man Maksym, who has a pregnant wife and young daughter, was one of several guests who decided against going to a wedding over the fear of being enlisted. He reportedly described the conscription officers as “bandits”. He said: I feel like I am in prison” and added: “There are more than a million police officers in Ukraine, why should I fight when they are not?"
While at an enlistment centre there was one man waiting who claimed he had been “kidnapped” and forced to come down after being “encircled” by officers. An officer at the centre called Vlad was full of contempt for the people avoiding conscription having himself fought in fierce battles in the Donbas region before being injured by shrapnel that hit him in the head, chest and legs.
“I don’t consider them men. What are they waiting for? If we run out of men, the enemy will come to their homes, rape their women, and kill their children," he said. The average soldier’s age on both sides is over 40, military analysts say. Some Ukrainians worry that lowering the minimum conscription age to 25 and taking more young adults out of the workforce could backfire by further harming the war-ravaged economy, which is why the draft age wasn’t simply set at 18.
Antonina Piliuhina, the 49-year-old Kyiv mother of a 21-years old son, said she opposed lowering the draft age. “I have just one son, I am a single mother,” Piliuhina said. “What did I raise him for all these years, for him to be taken away and then killed by someone for fun? I don’t need this.”
Mykola Petrovskyi, a 28-year-old social worker, said that although he loves Ukraine, he doesn’t think it’s right to send people to fight if they’re unwilling. “I am not ready to go somewhere tomorrow and kill people,” he said. “It’s not because I’m not a patriot of my country, it’s because I am not ready to kill. I am not born for this. I am a person who’s ready to help save someone’s life, but not take one.”