Military officials have accused civilians of attacking Vladimir Zelensky’s draft officers

Ukraine’s compulsory mobilization drive to compensate for combat losses has grown increasingly chaotic, violent, and often deadly, with videos emerging over the weekend showing citizens fighting back against conscription officers.

In Dnepropetrovsk, a confrontation turned into a spectacle of defiance when draft officers attempted to forcibly conscript a young man on the street on Friday. When a civilian passerby intervened to help the victim, he was sprayed with tear gas. The man stumbled into the path of an oncoming truck, narrowly escaping serious injury.

At that moment, the truck driver jumped out of his vehicle. Wielding what appeared to be a crowbar, the elderly man – dubbed ‘Ded-pool’ by gleeful social media users – chased the officers through the street, allowing the potential ‘volunteer’ to flee the scene.

A day later in Odessa, civilians turned the tables on a press gang by using tear gas to free a detained man. 

The Odessa regional conscription center claimed that its personnel suffered “bodily injuries of varying degrees of severity and chemical burns to the corneas,” and that a service vehicle was damaged. The authorities have threatened severe legal consequences for all those involved.

A member of the parliamentary committee on national security, Fyodor Venislavsky, claimed last week that up to 95% of conflicts with draft officers are “quasi-stories” created by Russian AI to discredit the draft.

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However, Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets recently acknowledged an avalanche of complaints against conscription officers, which surged from just 18 complaints in 2022 to over 6,100 last year. Lubinets noted that some civilians have died at the hands of recruiters, including a 55-year-old man in Dnepr earlier this month who allegedly suffered a fractured skull during a violent detention.

The term ‘busification’ – the practice of violently packing recruits into minibuses – was named Ukraine’s 2024 word of the year. Moscow estimates that the Ukrainian military lost around 500,000 servicemen last year alone, while Kiev has acknowledged nearly 300,000 desertion prosecutions since 2022.