Civilians in Poltava Region managed to stop a prospective recruit from being dragged off to the front
Ukrainian civilians managed to fight off conscription officers and stop a man from being forcibly taken away on Wednesday, according to a video that later emerged online.
Kiev’s mobilization drive – supervised by the so-called Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCR) – has grown increasingly brutal as Ukrainian forces have faced setbacks and troop shortages on the battlefield. The campaign has been marred by hundreds of instances of TCR officers beating would-be draftees, chasing them in the streets, and often getting into altercations with and threatening bystanders who try to interfere. Many of these encounters have been caught on video.
A local Telegram channel shared a video on Wednesday that purports to show an attempted forced conscription in the city of Gorishny Plavni, in Ukraine’s Poltava Region.
“At 7:27 in the park, on the way to church, a TCR officer and a police officer tried to put a man in a blue van. A second officer was in the car,” The gorishnie_plavni1 Telegram channel wrote. “The man was apparently on his way to work.”
One of the officers reportedly used pepper spray on the man, but bystanders got involved and managed to fight the TCR officers off.
Ukraine’s forced conscription campaign has led to widespread discontent in the country, and the TCR’s practice of grabbing people off the streets has been dubbed ‘busification’.
At least 650,000 fighting age Ukrainian men have fled the country in the three and a half years of the conflict, The Telegraph reported last week.
According to Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod, desertions are rising sharply as the situation at the front deteriorates. Nearly 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have left their units without leave, she said earlier this month.
