A Kyiv military recruitment office published, and soon deleted, a belligerent rant against alleged draft dodgers, branding them “murderers,” on Tuesday following the publication of statistics showing increasing numbers of attacks by Ukrainians on the nation’s recruitment sergeants.
Known by many names – conscientious objectors, draft dodgers, shirkers and, in Kyiv, “traitors” – those who seek to avoid conscription once again shot into the news in Ukraine after a report revealed that hundreds of recruiting sergeants had faced attacks from members of the public over the course of the war.
Major Ukrainian online news portal Ukrainska Pravda reported on Monday, citing the Ukrainian national army, that the public had attacked 272 conscription officers since the beginning of the present war in 2022. Of those, four had died in the line of duty: two run down by a truck, one stabbed, and one shot at point-blank range with a shotgun.
Attacks on those tasked with finding new soldiers from among the general public prompted an intemperate response from the Kyiv-region recruiting office, notes Die Welt. The office issued a statement attempting to remind the public that recruiting sergeants are wounded veterans returned from the front lines. The office said: “They survived heavy battles with the Russians … and all this so that evil and cowardly evaders could kill them now unarmed on their native land?!”
The rant against “evaders” went on, decrying them as undignified “plebs” and “demeaning creatures” hiding in corners, who post their “own snot” on social media in a bid to “smear” the recruitment organisation.
This “grey, evasive mass” are “condemned by society”, the recruiters said. The “war on shirkers” statement further added: “Each of you will remain in disgrace for the rest of your life and will never be will have no excuses: neither before the Ukrainian people, nor before the eternity of our heroes! A shirker is a traitor. A shirker is an enemy. A shirker is a murderer.”
The post attracted considerable controversy and was soon deleted, replaced by another which blamed Russian “bots” and disinformation for the negative response. Replies to this second statement observed by Breitbart News, apparently from members of the public, were in many cases highly critical of the recruitment centre. The comments referenced “busification,” the alleged act of abducting fighting-age men off the streets into waiting military transport buses for basic training, the existence of which is hotly debated and which Ukrainian authorities reject as Russian disinformation.
The office also deleted this message.
In yet another statement, the Kyiv office on Tuesday dealt with snatch-squad claims directly, dismissing the idea of “mass raids” by press-gangs and searches for men with drones as “hostile propaganda” by “the enemy.”
“Territorial recruitment and social support centres operate exclusively within the law, in regular mode, without ‘secret operations’ and fictitious methods,” the latest statement read.
If conscription has become a deadly game for the recruiters, it certainly has for the objectors. As reported in 2024, even by that point, 30 people were known to have died attempting to flee conscription, including by drowning, freezing to death, and being attacked by wild animals. A year into the war, 20,000 military age Ukrainian men were thought to have successfully made it abroad, with a further 20,000 said detained at the border attempting to flee.
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