BFM explains in a video that these are young Ukrainians who did not respond to their military summons and who were forced to become soldiers.
A thousand days on Tuesday that Ukraine has been fighting against the Russian invasion. If at the start of the conflict, his army had no difficulty mobilizing, after three years, and after having suffered heavy losses, finding volunteers in a country which has already mobilized a million people becomes more and more difficult. . The armed forces recently announced plans to recruit 160,000 personnel between November and February. Far from the requests made at the start of 2024 to President Zelensky, who raised the possibility of enlisting half a million men, in particular to replace exhausted soldiers at the front.
One of the avenues is to recall Ukrainians of fighting age living in Europe, whose number kyiv estimated at the start of the year at around 300,000, most of them residing in Poland. Some had fled their country illegally, precisely for fear of being mobilized. In early October, kyiv opened its first recruitment office in the Polish city of Lublin, and Ukraine's Defense Ministry announced last week that nearly 700 expatriate volunteers have signed up to join the Ukrainian Legion, a new formation of the army which was then supposed to be deployed against Russian troops.
An enrollment system deemed unfair
On its own soil, Ukraine is hunting, more and more intensely, those who resist. Dymitri, a recruitment agent, quoted by France Inter, explains that the orders are “to bring back men at any cost. At first we used to just patrol. Now we are carrying out raids in shopping centers, restaurants. »
Mobilization is a heated subject in the country, the enlistment system is considered unfair by many Ukrainians and has been at the center of numerous corruption scandals. So, those who are terrified of joining the front line hunker down at home. Oleg, a former taxi driver interviewed by BFM, no longer goes outside “except to take out the trash or go to the supermarket”. He survives thanks to relatives and talks about friends who died in the war “because they were thrown on a bus and sent to hell”.
We track recruiters on Telegram
Oleg is not an isolated case. In Lviv, where France Info reported on a team from the military police station patrolling the streets of the city, we come across forty-somethings who have returned to their studies or families who have had a third child, to get into the causes of exemption.
And when this is not possible, the resisters organize themselves, in particular via loops on Telegram messaging which report the comings and goings of the police and military.
