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Ukrainian military recruiters launched targeted raids at local restaurants, shopping centres and a rock concert over the weekend, detaining men and press-ganging them into the army.
“Get away from me!” one concertgoer shouted at three policemen as they pulled him towards a recruiting desk that had been set up on Friday outside the Place of Sports, where Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy had been playing.
The man’s face contorted in fear as he strained and pulled against the policemen, video footage showed. Several women filmed the policemen on their smartphones and shouted: “Shame! Shame on you!”
Policemen also waited to intercept men at Goodwine, a nearby shopping centre, and Avalon, a popular restaurant, according to reports.
Eyewitnesses said that the police checked all the men’s documents. Men who refused to show documents exempting them from military service or whose documents were considered faulty were dragged away.
Under Ukraine’s martial laws, all men between the ages of 25 and 60 are eligible for the army. Men between the ages of 18 and 60 are also banned from leaving the country.
Facing a severe shortage of soldiers, Ukraine reduced the mobilisation age to 25 from 27 and scrapped an “only partially eligible” loophole back in April. Punishment was also stiffened for men who didn’t show up at their summons.
Ukraine has also followed Russia by mobilising its prison population.
Western intelligence analysts estimate Russian casualties to stand at more than 650,000 soldiers. The data for Ukraine’s war casualties have not been released, but its casualties are estimated to be a third or a quarter of Russia’s.
Fatigue and fear of being killed on frontlines have sapped Ukrainians’ enthusiasm for signing up to fight in a war that has now lasted more than two-and-a-half years.
Oleksandr Danylyuk, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said: “Mobilisation has begun to be perceived as a one-way ticket, where the only way to end service is to die or become disabled.”
Some men are so desperate to escape mobilisation that they are risking their lives to break out of Ukraine.
In April, Ukraine’s Border Guard Service said that at least 30 men have died trying to flee the country since the start of the war, often drowning trying to swim across fast-flowing rivers or freezing to death on mountain passes.
Russian forces have been making slow but steady progress along the frontlines in Ukraine, but on Saturday evening Volodymyr Zelenksy, the president, said that Ukrainian forces had secured the frontline in Russia’s Kursk region, which Ukraine invaded in August.
Prosecutors also said that they were investigating the alleged killing of nine Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russian forces in Kursk. They were allegedly stripped naked before being shot.
