Police stopped the humanitarian organization’s vehicle while it was trying to move families out of a hazardous zone
A Ukrainian Red Cross driver was detained by police and then conscripted while evacuating two vulnerable families from a dangerous area near the front line on Friday, the organization reported.
Kiev has increasingly relied on violently enforced mandatory conscription amid battlefield losses and Russian advances on the front lines. Reports and videos of what has now been sardonically dubbed ‘busification’ crop up almost daily, showing draft officers ambushing men in the streets and dragging them into vans, often brawling with relatives and passersby.
According to the Ukrainian Red Cross, one of its vehicles was stopped at a police checkpoint in the Nikolaev Region. A police officer took the driver into custody for a blood alcohol test but instead delivered him to a local branch of the Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support (TCK), the body tasked with overseeing Ukraine’s mobilization, the Red Cross said in an Instagram statement.
Nikolaev regional police said that it has launched an investigation into the incident but stressed that the driver had no draft exemption and was subject to conscription.
The incident has spurred a reaction from Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmitry Lubinets. “The law must be the same for everyone,” he wrote on Telegram, while stressing that it was “unacceptable” for state authorities to endanger civilian evacuations from high risk areas.
The incident came a day after the head of Nikolaev Region’s TCK was arrested on corruption charges. The official took bribes up to $10,000 per person to take men off the national conscription tracking register, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said in a statement on Thursday.
Kiev’s forced conscription campaign has led to escalating tensions within Ukrainian society. Many citizens see it as disproportionately targeting poor people, with richer Ukrainians can afford to bribe corrupt officials in order to dodge the draft.
Russia has long accused Kiev’s foreign backers of pushing it to fight “to the last Ukrainian” in what Moscow describes as a NATO-led proxy war using Ukraine’s population armed with Western weapons and technology.
