Anton was walking home with a friend in Kyiv when he was suddenly seized and forced into the back seat of a police car, with an officer on each side, heading towards a future that would likely see him in the trenches.
The 52-year-old, who requested to withhold his surname to protect his identity, has supported Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but did not want to be sent to the front line. The grinding attrition of war seemed like a death sentence given his health issues. He is HIV-positive and has arthritis and poor eyesight – conditions that he believed made him medically unfit to serve.
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But since mobilisation laws took effect in May 2024, Ukraine’s recruitment officers have been ambushing men on the street.
In late January, when he was allegedly captured, he had been avoiding venturing out of his apartment block – fearful of both Ukraine’s controversial conscription drive and Russian drone attacks on his neighbourhood.
But on one of the few times he did leave his home, the police jumped out of a car that was parked in a residential garage and chased him, he said.
He was then caught and driven to a militarised section of a state clinic in Kyiv, where his phone was confiscated.
“They told me to mute my phone and hand it over,” he said. “I started to protest. The guard said, ‘Don’t push me to use physical methods on you. Give it to me now.’ So I did.”
After undergoing medical tests, he was transferred to a military recruitment centre on the outskirts of the city, where he would spend two days in a room with barred windows, a bucket of cold pasta, and no way to contact the outside world.
What happened to Anton has a term in Ukraine – “busification” – men stopped on city streets, checked for exemption cards, and placed directly onto buses bound for mobilisation centres.
According to observers, as Ukraine’s conscription crisis grows, it is increasingly common.
On the streets, resistance against the recruitment officers has also turned physical, and on occasion, deadly.
Within the space of three days in February, a draft officer was shot dead at a petrol station in Poltava oblast, an explosion inside a draft office in Rivne killed one person and wounded six, and another blast wounded one at an enlistment office in Pavlohrad. Ukraine’s Security Service later said Russia had recruited the perpetrator of the Rivne bombing.
At the military recruitment centre, Anton watched on as young men arrived, freshly caught from the streets with stories to tell.
One man told him he had been seized hours earlier, as he prepared to drive his wife to hospital to give birth to their first child.
“There was a strong sense of solidarity,” he told Al Jazeera. “They shared their life stories and tried to offer advice and share their opinions, as well as their experiences of dealing with the guards.”
As recruitment officers began parcelling the men out to military units, Anton discovered that his HIV status had been withheld from the commanders they were being offered to – information that, once revealed, saw him deemed too unwell to serve.
He was eventually released, but said it cost him $5,000 in lawyers’ fees to walk free on a conditional summons, and a further $30,000 paid to fixers who promised to secure his documents and then vanished.
He is now confined to his home, afraid to step outside.
At the time of publishing, the Command of the Territorial Defence Forces had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
In the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion, initial battlefield successes and a wave of patriotism led to hundreds of thousands volunteering to serve, but after a failed counteroffensive in 2023, recruitment became difficult, and tactics hardened.
Two laws signed in April 2024 lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, quintupled fines for evasion, and dropped a promised provision that would have allowed soldiers to demobilise after 36 months of service, leaving those already fighting with no fixed end to their duty.
Men have reportedly been taken from a range of sites.
In October 2024, footage outside a concert at Kyiv’s Palace of Sports showed officers dragging a man across the pavement as onlookers chanted “Shame!”
In the western city of Uzhhorod, a man was rounded up as he left Sunday mass despite carrying papers proving he was the sole carer for his disabled mother.
Corruption in the recruitment process has been alleged. In some cases, men have obtained exemptions through paid-for medical diagnoses.
In October 2024, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned after journalists reported that dozens of prosecutors in the western Khmelnytskyi region held disability status to avoid the draft.
The scandal proved to be the tip of the iceberg: Ukraine’s security service announced it had cancelled 4,106 fake disability certificates issued through corrupt medical examination commissions that year, charging 64 commission officials in the process.
Then, in January 2025, the chief psychiatrist of Ukraine’s armed forces – a senior member of the central military medical commission that decides whether conscripts are fit to serve – was arrested for illegal enrichment, having accumulated a house, apartments in Kyiv and Odesa, land, and four luxury cars worth more than $1m since the invasion began.
Investigators searching his home found $152,000 and 34,000 euros in cash.
‘Systematic and large-scale’
The alleged abuses have been documented internationally.
In a memorandum published on July 8, 2025, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights raised alarm over mobilisation practices, including beatings, harsh detentions, denial of access to lawyers, and the conscription of men with disabilities, citing Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, who had described the violations as “systematic and large-scale”.
This has affected public opinion.
According to a July 2025 survey by Ukraine’s Rating Group, only 24 percent of Ukrainians said they trusted enlistment officers.
Telegram groups began tracking recruiters in real time – a movement so popular that Google’s Threat Analysis Group identified a suspected Russian intelligence operation piggybacking on it in October 2024, creating a fake app that purported to map recruiters’ locations while secretly installing malware.
Attacks on recruitment officers
More than 600 attacks on enlistment officers have been recorded since the start of the war, with assaults nearly tripling in 2025.
The first four months of 2026 alone saw 117 – more than 20 times the five recorded in the war’s entire first year.
Anger has boiled over.
On July 8, 2026, a crowd in Lviv’s Sykhiv district blocked, damaged and overturned a recruitment service vehicle during the detention of a man wanted for draft evasion, prompting pre-trial investigations by the national police and the Security Service of Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued that the only beneficiary of such scenes is Russia.
Yet the condemnations have also been tempered with concessions by institutions like the Defence Ministry, which conceded that mobilisation methods need improvement.
Oleksandr Syrskii, who was sacked as the country’s commander-in-chief last month along with the defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, also acknowledged the army was working to correct mistakes and prevent rights violations at enlistment offices.
