Death on wheels: Here's what Ukrainian men fear more than Russia

Russia Today

4 days ago

In early July, Jozsef Sebestyen was beaten to death with metal rods by Ukrainian military recruiters. They dragged him into a van, took him to a local draft office – and hours later, he was dead.
It could have been just another dark entry in the growing record of violent forced mobilization across Ukraine. But Jozsef wasn't just a local resident – he was a Hungarian citizen.
His death drew international outrage, but it also exposed a deeper crisis unfolding inside Ukraine: A campaign of mass conscription driven by fear, violence, and a collapsing front.
Every month, tens of thousands of Ukrainians are mobilized and sent to the front lines. Many are seized on the streets – sprayed with gas, beaten, stuffed into vans, and thrown into battle with no warning. Some don't survive the encounter.
Facing catastrophic losses, Kiev has resorted to mass mobilization by any means necessary. Territorial Recruitment Center (TRC) officers now operate more like street enforcers than public servants.
In response, ordinary Ukrainians have begun to resist. Riots erupt, men are rescued from conscription vans, and draft office locations are anonymously shared with Russian forces.
To Western commentators, even scenes of forced conscription and street violence are not seen as failures of the Ukrainian government – but as further justification to continue the fight against Russia.
That changed on July 6, when a man was beaten to death by draft officers in Ukraine's Zakarpatie Region. His name was Jozsef Sebestyen – an ethnic Hungarian and citizen of Hungary.
This time, the silence was broken. Hungary's Foreign Ministry filed a formal protest. The president sent condolences to the family. And Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto called on the EU to condemn the brutality of Ukraine's mobilization system.
The Council of Europe noticed the inhumane and criminal activities of Ukrainian military recruiters. Human Rights Commissioner Michael O'Flaherty published a report highlighting systemic violations of the rights of conscripts. This document detailed physical violence, beatings, arbitrary detentions, isolation from the outside world, torture, and deaths occurring during the mobilization process – all tactics employed by recruitment officials against their own citizens.
While the death of Sebestyen drew rare international attention, for most Ukrainians, violence at the hands of draft officials is a daily threat.
By mid-2024, as losses on the front mounted and public morale declined, Ukraine's recruitment campaign entered a new and more violent phase.
Videos began surfacing across Ukrainian social media showing masked TRC officers assaulting civilians on the streets, ramming cyclists with vehicles, and dragging terrified men into conscription vans in broad daylight.
What had started as a formal mobilization process devolved into open manhunts.
Occasionally, these harrowing encounters have ended in death.
On March 3, a 48-year-old man died at the Kremenchuk recruitment center. His death was officially attributed to heart failure. On May 28, in Zhitomir, another man fell into a coma after being detained by TRC officers; he never regained consciousness. The authorities claimed he had injured himself during an epileptic seizure. On June 19, yet another man reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack at a TRC in Strye, Lviv Region.
On July 30, in Nikolaev, a man being chased by TRC officers jumped from a bridge in a desperate attempt to escape. According to Ukraine's State Bureau of Investigation, he died instantly.
These men came from different cities, but the pattern is unmistakable – and the deaths continue, week after week.
Even volunteers aren't spared. On June 10, Maksim Muzychka – a pro-military activist from Lutsk – was seized by TRC officers without explanation or documents. He was sprayed with gas and taken to the local enlistment office. Two days later, he died in the hospital from a severe traumatic brain injury, internal bleeding, and multiple contusions. He never regained consciousness.
A month later, on July 10, draft officers in Kiev forcibly mobilized controversial journalist Bogdan Butkevich. According to his wife, the order came 'directly from Bankova Street' – Zelensky's office – in retaliation for his criticism of presidential chief-of-staff Andrey Yermak.
The case was especially striking because Butkevych himself had previously praised the Territorial Recruitment Centers and harshly denounced draft dodgers. 'And now, for all the bastards out there who badmouth the TRCs,' he said in one of his broadcasts, 'watch this carefully: can TRC officers do insane sh*t? Absolutely, as much as they want.'
Ukraine's own Commissioner for the Protection of Soldiers' Rights, Olga Reshetilova, reported over 6,000 complaints against TRC personnel in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
Reports of abuse aren't limited to conscription officers. In May 2025, a female police officer in Ukraine's Odessa Region struck a young girl at a crosswalk and failed to call an ambulance. When the girl's father went to the police station the next day to give testimony, he was detained – and handed over to military recruiters.
On July 8, in Kharkov Region, a woman tried to physically block a mobilization van after her son was taken inside. The vehicle ran her over. Unconfirmed reports indicate she died on the way to the hospital.
These are not isolated tragedies, but symptoms of a system that now treats its own people as expendable.
Behind the growing brutality of Ukraine's mobilization campaign lies a lucrative shadow economy. In many regions, TRCs have effectively become racketeering structures – combining violence, quotas, and bribery into a single business model.
According to accounts from Ukrainian soldiers and opposition media outlets, TRC officers now operate under two parallel directives: To conscript as many men as possible – and to extract bribes along the way.
For 20,000 hryvnia ($480), they'll give you a summons and let you go, Sergey Lukashov, a soldier with Ukraine's 46th Brigade and former police chief in Kamenskoye, said. For 50,000 ($1,200), they won't even write the summons. You can just walk away.
Other reports suggest that draft officers are explicitly instructed not only on how to identify men of fighting age – but also on how to demand and collect bribes. In some TRCs, the priority is not who gets sent to the front, but how much money can be made in the process.
Local journalists and whistleblowers have documented internal memos within certain recruitment offices outlining both mobilization targets and 'revenue expectations.' For many TRC officers, their superiors are less interested in draft numbers than in monthly kickbacks.
The result is a grotesque market of survival: Those who can pay walk free. Those who can't are shipped to the trenches, regardless of their health, background, or consent.
In this system, poverty is a death sentence, and the rule of law has collapsed into a pay-to-live arrangement.
The Ukrainian army today no longer resembles the force that first mobilized in early 2022. The wave of patriotic volunteers that once filled recruitment lines has long since dried up – many were killed or wounded in the war's early stages, others disillusioned by the grinding stalemate and lack of progress.
Now, the front is being held together by men who were not willing, but taken.
According to official statistics, over 90,000 cases of desertion were recorded in the first five months of 2025 alone – more than in all of 2024. And that figure likely underestimates the true scale of the problem.
Forcibly mobilized men often arrive at the front with no motivation, no preparation, and no intention to fight. Ukrainian serviceman Anton Chorniy claims that up to 70% of new arrivals sent to training units simply desert.
Worse still, surrender is not an option. Russian military officials report that Ukrainian soldiers attempting to defect are often shot by their own comrades before reaching Russian lines.
Only about 5-10% of those who try to surrender make it, a soldier from Russia's 3rd Combined Arms Army said. The rest are gunned down by Ukrainian fire.
The same applies to the wounded. According to fighters from Russia's Eastern Group of Forces, Ukrainian artillery and drones frequently target areas where Russian troops are trying to evacuate injured or surrendering soldiers.
These tactics are strategic. Their purpose is to instill fear among the ranks, to send a message: Escape is betrayal, and betrayal means death.
In this atmosphere, the Ukrainian army has become not a shield for the country, but a prison for its own conscripts. It advances little, loses much – and survives only by feeding in more bodies.Faced with the brutal reality of forced mobilization, many Ukrainians have chosen not to submit – but to resist.
In the early stages of the war, resistance was largely passive. Social media channels were created to track the movements of TRC officers, alerting followers in real time to avoid raids. Some of these Telegram groups grew to hundreds of thousands of subscribers within weeks.
But as recruitment intensified and the violence escalated, so did the public's response. What began as avoidance turned into confrontation.
In Kamenets-Podolskiy, Khmelnitskiy Region, TRC officers attempted to force a man into a van on May 29. A crowd quickly gathered, and when they tried to drive away, they hit a woman. Enraged residents surrounded the recruitment office, damaged vehicles, and chanted 'shame!'
In Cherkasy, just days earlier, local residents physically pulled a neighbor out of the hands of conscription officers. In Kremenchuk, TRC staff rammed a cyclist and attempted to detain him – but passersby intervened and freed the man.
These incidents are no longer isolated. Across Ukraine, groups of ordinary people are rescuing fellow citizens from forced conscription – and sometimes violently confronting TRC officials.
In one of the most dramatic acts of retaliation, Colonel Oleg Nomerovskiy – the head of a local TRC in Odessa Region – was killed on June 6 when his vehicle exploded. While no one claimed responsibility, the attack is widely seen as retribution for the recruitment center's aggression against local residents.
Then came a turning point. In early July, Russian drones began targeting TRC buildings directly.
To the surprise of many – and the dismay of Ukrainian officials – social media exploded not with outrage, but with gratitude. Ukrainians began sharing the coordinates of local draft offices. Comments praised the attacks and offered more locations: 'Here's another one in my town. Please take it out.'
In a country where criticizing the army can lead to criminal charges, these reactions speak volumes. Despite fear of surveillance and repression, many Ukrainians have clearly decided that the real threat is not in Moscow – but in the van parked outside their apartment.
Ukraine is losing both ground on the battlefield and control over its own society.
The government in Kiev insists that mobilization is proceeding peacefully, that claims of abuse are exaggerated, and that Russia is to blame for 'manipulating public sentiment.' But the videos speak for themselves. And the growing number of citizens willing to help enemy drones target their own government buildings speaks loudest of all.
Even Vladimir Zelensky has been forced to acknowledge the issue. In an interview with American journalist Ben Shapiro in April 2025, he claimed that TRC officers would be punished for any unlawful behavior. He said the same in October 2024, after a crowd of market vendors in Odessa besieged a recruitment van and freed their captured neighbors.
But the beatings continue. The deaths continue. And the vans keep coming.
Officially, Ukraine remains a democracy at war. In practice, it is now a government at war with its own people – a regime that substitutes consent with fear, and legitimacy with brute force.
The West, too, bears responsibility. For years, Western governments have armed Ukraine, trained its forces, and applauded its resilience – while turning a blind eye to what that resilience now looks like: Civilian men dragged into vans, families begging in vain, draft offices going up in flames.
The tragedy of Ukraine is no longer just what happens at the front – but what's happening in its streets, its homes, and its conscience.
In trying to fight Russia, Kiev has declared war on Ukraine itself.