Bribes and hiding at home

. . . continued

Real-Time Alerts

Every few minutes, a new tipoff drops:

“Pishonivska Street 37. The olives have arrived”. “There’s a bus of olives outside the market; six olives walking around inside handing out papers.”

Impact on Daily Life

Other people simply stay at home. A factory owner in eastern Ukraine said the threat of being grabbed by conscription officers on the morning commute meant some workers were too scared to go to work.

He said:

“I met a guy who told me he was taken from the street and within a week his unit was starting to attack a village near Bakhmut. And he told me ‘It’s the first time I picked up a rifle and after a week I go to attack this village’. He was shot twice, once in the arm and once in the back.”

Training Programme

Mobilised recruits receive several weeks of training before being sent to the front. Many are sent to Britain for brief courses in the essentials of frontline combat, although the training often appears to be rudimentary.

Swift Deployment

In Lviv, one man who was served with mobilisation papers outside a supermarket in the city said he was conscripted, sent to Britain for training, dispatched to the frontline, and then wounded all within a two-month time span.

Growing Resistance

The stakes have left many people reluctant to comply with mobilisation calls, and those who receive the initial set of papers often lock themselves away to avoid being dragged to the recruitment office.

The Social Divide

“There are two categories of people – one is already in the army and the other is too scared to go outside so as not to be conscripted, and no salary will make them leave their houses,”

said the factory owner.

Nightclub Raid

One young woman, who like most people when speaking about mobilisation requested to remain anonymous, recalled a scene in Kyiv earlier in the summer at a nightclub in the capital.

A few minutes after 10pm, when bars and clubs are required by law to close during wartime, the club was raided by armed men in uniform, who told the women to leave. They then handed all the men conscription notices.

Personal Impact

“My husband has an important job for his company so he has an exemption, but my visiting friend did not, and he was terrified. He has gone back to his small town and has been sitting at home, scared to go out, ever since,”

the woman said.

Public Opinion

Many Ukrainians who have been serving since the start of the war see avoiding the draft as nothing short of treasonous. The country’s political leadership said it recognised the mobilisation process was difficult, and wants to avoid excess zeal in recruitment, but said Ukraine had little choice but to continue conscription if the army is to stand up to Russia, which has mobilised hundreds of thousands of men since the start of the war.

Official Response

“Of course it’s hard to expect people to be positive about mobilisation,”

– admitted Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy, in a recent interview in Kyiv.

“The people who went first were those who had this internal call, who were the most patriotic, but they are there for 17 months and we need rotation. Of course it’s scary, it could mean death or disability. It’s the 21st century, you finished university, you were trying to get a job, and now you have to take a gun and defend your home. But the president is trying to talk to society, to explain what is at stake,”

he said.