Names marked with an asterisk* have been changed to protect identities.
Kyiv, Ukraine – Artem* is determined to never join Ukraine’s armed forces.
“If I ever fight, I won’t fight for Ukraine,” the 29-year-old from the westernmost Zakarpattia region told Al Jazeera.
A “conscription patrol” of three police and two military officers rounded him up in late June as he was leaving the Sunday mass at a cathedral in Uzhhorod, the regional capital.
Artem had paperwork proving that he was the only caretaker of his disabled, ailing 66-year-old mother and therefore could not be drafted.
But the patrol detained and brought him to a conscription office, where two officers took Artem to a separate room. He claimed they beat him and tried to force him to “volunteer” for military service.
When he refused, he said they tied and blindfolded him and four more reluctant detainees and took them to a forest outside Uzhhorod.
One of the officers ordered them at gunpoint to run to what turned out to be a fence on the Slovakian border, Artem claimed.
Another officer videotaped the men’s “attempt to illegally cross the border”, which is punishable by up to four years in jail, and said they could “negotiate their release fee”, Artem claimed.
He said that his family paid $2,000 for his release and another $15,000 for a fake permit to leave Ukraine as men of fighting age, 25 to 60, are not allowed to travel abroad.
Artem, who spoke via a messaging app from an Eastern European nation, asked to withhold his real name, personal details and the location of the conscription office he claims to have been beaten in.
A deepening crisis
Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify all of the details of Artem’s story, but some of his allegations corroborate with other cases of conscription-related coercion and corruption in Ukraine amid a dire shortage of front-line troops in the fight against Russia.
Between January and June, the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman’s office received more than 2,000 complaints about the use of force by conscription patrols that consist of military and police officers.
In one case, patrol officers hit a bicyclist in the central Rivne region with their car in January after he refused to pull over. They beat and tear-gassed him to deliver him to the conscription office and “illegally mobilise”, investigators said. Ultimately, the patrolling officers volunteered to go to the front line to avoid assault charges, they said.
On August 1, police in the central city of Vinnytsia used tear gas to disperse a crowd that tried to storm a conscription office and release some 100 men that they claimed had been detained illegally.
Meanwhile, a privileged few abuse their position to dodge the draft.
In October 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the prosecutor general after several public prosecutors obtained fake disability papers that also entitled them to sizeable “pensions”.
In January, Oleh Druz – the chief psychiatrist for Ukraine’s armed forces, who could declare any conscript unfit for service – was arrested. He now faces up to 10 years in jail for “illegal enrichment”.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Druz reportedly bought several luxurious apartments, two plots of land and several BMW cars – and kept $152,000 and 34,000 euros ($40,000) in cash at home.
For more than two years, conscription patrols have been combing public places, subway stations, nightclubs and even crashing wedding parties in search of men of fighting age – 25 to 60, more than a dozen witnesses from all over Ukraine told Al Jazeera.
They tour regions outside their official jurisdiction. “Fake patrols” of burly uniformed men then blackmail those they catch. A release fee is $400 or more, but those who refuse to pay up are handed over to real conscription offices, the witnesses say.
Several conscription officers are ex-servicemen who often suffer from PTSD, despise draft dodgers and have no qualms about humiliating, abusing and beating them, they say.
Hundreds of thousands of men are understood to be in hiding, causing a dire shortage in the workforce. Across the country, there are far fewer male construction workers, farmhands, cooks and taxi drivers.
Men whose military papers are in order prefer to move around with a witness who can, if needed, videotape an encounter with a conscription patrol.
“I drive around with my mom because there are too many checkpoints anywhere I go,” Ferentz, an ethnic Hungarian taxi driver in Uzhhorod, told Al Jazeera as his mother smiled from the front seat of his old Skoda.
Meanwhile, a societal division is growing.
Current or former Ukrainian servicemen and their families are increasingly indignant about how draft dodgers justify their reluctance to enlist.
“I broke up with many female friends who defend their husbands’ or boyfriends’ right not to fight,” Hanna Kovaleva, whose husband Albert volunteered in 2022, told Al Jazeera. “This [mindset] is disgusting – ‘let someone else die while I’m hiding behind my wife’s skirt.’”
Preemptive emigration
Before he turns 17, Bogdan* is leaving Ukraine – but not in search of better living conditions.
He lives in central Kyiv in a three-bedroom apartment with his parents, goes to a private school and spends weekends in a spacious country house.
But his parents do not want him to be conscripted.
Even though it could only happen only when Bogdan turns 25, they say they are not taking ay risks.
“With this chaos on the front line, you don’t just want your kid to die because of his officer’s mistake,” his father Dmitry* told Al Jazeera.
On September 1, Bogdan will start school in Prague, where his aunt lives.
Crushed and heartbroken – he just started dating a classmate – he says he has no choice.
“I know I sound very unpatriotic, but I don’t want to end up rotting in a ditch,” he told Al Jazeera.
In January, United States President Donald Trump’s administration urged Kyiv to lower the draft age from 25 to 18 – reiterating the previous administration’s request.
As the average age of a Ukrainian serviceman has reached 45 from 42 three years ago, more and more Ukrainians with military backgrounds agree with the request.
Alternatively, men aged 18 and older could serve in a “labour army” that manufactures drones and other war-related items, according to Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, ex-deputy head of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
He said that mobilisation should involve all men of fighting age without exceptions – while Ukraine’s economy should be “reformatted” to primarily serve the army’s needs.
“If unpopular strategic decisions at home are not implemented, the situation only gets worse. No foreigners will fight for us,” Romanenko told Al Jazeera.
