Ukrainian Police Raid Draft-Dodgers in Nationwide Conscription Searches

Ukrainian police conducted nationwide raids on draft dodger gangs on Friday as the country battles to generate enough conscripted soldiers to keep its military competitive in the war against Russia without radically widening recruitment criteria.

The National Police of Ukraine said they conducted “over 200 searches” of gangs assisting illegal border crossings by adult Ukrainian males, who have been banned from leaving the country since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2022. The searches “at the premises of persons involved in illegal transactions” took place in 19 of 27 Ukrainian regions, police said Friday.

According to the AFP news agency, the raids against draft dodging-enabling gangs followed searches of 600 addresses last week.

In a statement, Ukraine’s police said draft-dodging crimes are “committed through fraud, forgery of documents, unauthorized interference in the operation of electronic registers, and bribery of officials.”

Announcing the latest raids, Ukraine’s police published images, including one anonymised picture [top] of officers wearing police and ‘Cyberpolice Department’ patches on their coats accompanying fatigue-wearing armed officers of the national police’s Special Patrol unit.

While Ukraine has over a million men in its conscription army, thousands of nationals have evaded call-up orders or registration on the national database. As previously reported in 2023, 20,000 military-aged men were known to have illegally crossed Ukraine’s borders by that point to flee abroad.

Ukraine’s border guards said then they had caught another 21,000 at the frontier and brought them back into the country. While many will presumably have fled out of concern for their own lives, attempting to go abroad is not without risks, with the Ukrainian government stating in Spring 2024 that they know of 30 people who died trying to flee the country.

A spokesman for the government said those who died had attempted to get out of Ukraine by trying to cross hazardous mountain passes, swimming border rivers, and in some cases, had even been killed by wild animals in the wilderness, presumably bears, which are common in that part of Europe. Some reportedly have frozen to death trying to cross the Carpathian mountains.

It is claimed that the recent crackdown on draft dodgers has caused “panic” among those avoiding enlistment and the criminal gangs that support them. Even before this recent change in tactics, military officers in “conscription squads” patrolled the streets of Ukrainian cities, checking the identities of men to ensure they had entered their details in the national database and were not fugitives if call-up papers had been served.

In 2024, men were dragged out of a Kyiv nightclub if they were unable to show their identity papers or produce proof of exception from conscription amid overnight raids on restaurants, shops, and music venues. UK broadcaster the BBC noted a wedding of a young Ukrainian couple where half the guests didn’t show up because they were in hiding from conscription and felt turning up was too risky, and noted: “For those avoiding the draft, public transport is now off limits. So, too, are restaurants, supermarkets, and weekend trips to the park to play football.”

The broadcaster cited the remarks of one conscription officer who said of the people he was rounding up at train stations: “I don’t consider them men. What are they waiting for? If we run out of men, the enemy will come to their homes, rape their women, and kill their children.”

Those caught dodging can face criminal prosecution. But as reported in the Ukrainian press this week, courts can take a lenient view in rare cases. A Poltava man who was discovered to have been served call-up papers but who had ignored them for a year was let off with one year on probation as the judge noted he has an elderly mother who was dependent on his care, has a young child, and that he had made regular donations of money to the military.

Ukraine reduced its minimum age of conscription from 27 to 25 last year, a difficult and unpopular decision the government had resisted in a bid to avoid a post-war demographic crisis by risking the deaths of the country’s generation of future parents. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is in the 40s.

There have been protests in Ukraine by groups of wives, mothers, and children against the fact conscription is open-ended and lasts for the duration of the conflict. Protesters state they want their men back and call for a return of the pre-war standard of an 18-month callup.