The country’s military is facing high desertion rates and a shortage of fighting-age men at the front
Any major public event in Ukraine can be raided by conscription officials looking for potential recruits, an officer responsible for enforcing mobilization admitted in a recent interview.
Kiev overhauled its system of military service this year in an attempt to boost conscription rates amid a shortage of manpower at the front. Meanwhile, several large concerts have been targeted recently. Attendees found officials waiting at the exits to check their status and, in some cases, issue summonses.
Oleg Timoshenko, who leads the draft campaign in the city of Cherkasy, was responsible for one such raid on a concert in mid-October. In an interview with local media last week, he said that such efforts were part of the conscription center’s regular work.
“We analyze the developing situation, the number of people that the Army needs, and where such people could congregate,” he told the online news outlet 18000.
Asked whether officials followed the schedule of public events to pick raid targets, Timoshenko said “of course” they did. But this “does not mean that conscription officials or police will be at every concert,” he added. The next raid in the region could happen “tomorrow or in two months,” he said.
A concert in Kiev by Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy in October marked the first major incident of the kind. Some 50 military personnel and police officers were deployed outside the Palace of Sports to screen male attendees.
The group’s frontman, Vyacheslav Vakarchuk, served as an MP and in 2019 founded the pro-Western Golos party. Since its parliamentary faction is in opposition to Vladimir Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, there was speculation that the event was targeted for political reasons.
Kiev’s mobilization drive is being carried out in an increasingly strong-armed fashion, Western media have acknowledged. An officer interviewed by The Telegraph last week compared draft dodgers with cornered rats who keep fighting even after being caught.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military is plagued with high desertion rates, with at least 60,000 troops having gone AWOL, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.
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