Ukraine’s struggle to fill its military ranks has turned violent, with both recruiters and potential conscripts increasingly using force against one another as the war with Russia grinds into its fifth year.
The national police have recorded more than 600 assaults on recruitment officers to date, describing the aggression as “increasingly threatening.” At the same time, Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner logged over 6,000 complaints against recruiters last year, double the 2024 tally, including allegations of abuse, unlawful detention, and poor treatment of conscripts.
In April, several recruiters were stabbed, one fatally. More recently in Lviv, about 200 protesters surrounded officers who were detaining a suspected draft dodger and smashed their vehicle. President Zelensky condemned the attack.
“Violence leads to violence. It’s a huge problem and it’s going to get worse,” said opposition MP Oleksandr Honcharenko, who described the current system as “brutal mobilization.”
Ukrainians have coined a term for what is happening: “busification”, the practice of mobile patrols forcibly bundling men into buses to be sent to recruitment centers. Analyst Ivan Stupak put it bluntly: “When they need an extra 5,000 men, they start grabbing them.”
The desperation on both sides is the product of a war that has exhausted the pool of willing volunteers. Vasyl Krupych, a serving soldier who was himself attacked with a crowbar while on patrol looking for draft dodgers in December, put it plainly: “Nobody volunteers. Everyone is afraid to die.” Krupych spent six weeks in hospital after the attack, which left him with a broken rib. His case is still going through the courts.
Even those legally exempt from the draft are not safe. Kyrylo Ogdansky, a professor in Dnipro who is exempt from military service, was stopped on the street by plain-clothes recruiters. When he objected that no police were present, he was knocked down and beaten in the head and nose. The recruiters threatened to send him directly to the front line in Pokrovsk, one of the hottest sectors of the war. He spent two weeks in hospital.
Ogdansky decided to speak out despite the risk of feeding Russian propaganda. “Such a problem exists. If everyone is silent, then why would it stop? I understand the problem of conscription, but no official has the right to act like this.”
The crisis has a political dimension. Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov was sacked recently over a clash with the commander-in-chief. He had begun introducing reforms, fixed-term contracts, better salaries, and a planned overhaul of the conscription system, but none of it was completed before his dismissal. Only an acting defense minister remains, and conscription reform has stalled.
Ukraine now openly admits the problem, which is itself a shift. For much of the war, the government hesitated to acknowledge the scale of the recruitment crisis for fear of demoralizing the public and handing ammunition to Russian propaganda. But the violence has made silence impossible.
The deeper problem remains unsolved: Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can find volunteers for. And as long as the war shows no sign of ending, the fear that Krupych described, “everyone is afraid to die”, will only deepen the cycle of coercion and resistance.