Forced conscription in Ukraine

 

Kiev has taken to rounding up men 16-65 years of age on the streets, dragging them into vehicles and sending them to the front lines with little to no training and armaments. The perfect description of 'cannon fodder'

By Petr Lavrenin (Odessa-born political journalist and expert on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union)

Cases where law enforcement officers have applied force when handing out conscription notices and illegally delivered men to enlistment offices have given rise to public discontent. However, the Ukrainian authorities clearly have no intention of pausing enlistment because the situation remains critical at some sections of the front. 

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are losing their grip on fortified areas around Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), and taking huge numbers of casualties, according to the Guardian and other media outlets. Meanwhile, Kiev continues to issue mobilization summonses and is sending people without proper training. 

Men of military age are being hunted down, and videos showing military commissars going to extreme lengths to hand out summonses, including by force, constantly circulate on social media. 

Odessa, in particular, stands out in this respect. For example, military commissars were caught driving around the city in ambulances. When they came across men of the appropriate age, they stopped, handed over summonses and drove on. After videos emerged on social networks, local military commissars had to explain themselves and claimed that they were given the ambulance to use for their work. 

The case of Bogdan Pokito received particularly wide attention. The 33-year-old resident of Ternopol was handed a summons at a bus stop at the end of January and, without any military training, sent to the front near Artyomovsk, where he died just a few days later.  

Ukraine badly needs conscripts, but the enthusiasm of military-age men is declining and the authorities know it. 

In August 2022, the Ministry of Health calculated the approximate number of Ukrainians who will suffer from mental disorders in the aftermath of the war. At the time, Minister Viktor Lyashko predicted that 15 million people would be affected. “We are already predicting in absolute terms the number of people who will suffer from mental disorders as a result of this war — that’s over 15 million people. These are the people who will at least need psychological support,” the official said. 

It is still unclear how many people the Armed Forces of Ukraine plan to draft in the near future. But over the past two months, about 30,000 servicemen have been sent to Western Europe for training. These are mostly people without prior military experience who need to be trained on Western equipment. Add to this the number of conscripts required to urgently replace losses at the front and those needed for auxiliary work outside the active war zone, and the figures may drastically grow. 

~ Reprinted in part from a much larger article that ran in RT

~ ~ See this short video on Ukrainian troops killing civilians in the Dombass region of eastern Ukraine where the Russian-ethnics predominate