What “Doesn’t Exist.”

Ukrainian journalist for “Channel 24” Daryna Trunova posted on her Facebook page on October 22 a story about the forced conscription of her friends’ son. According to her, the man was drafted and the very next day ended up in the hospital with a severe head injury. Despite surgery, he died on October 23. Trunova said that police in Kyiv’s Podil district refused to open a criminal investigation into the case.

In her post, the journalist wrote: “If I hadn’t heard this story myself, and if these weren’t my friends, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible.” The remark is notable—Trunova herself had previously called talk of forced conscription a myth. Just a week before her post, she had published an interview with an adviser to the Kyiv Regional Military Enlistment Office urging people not to believe such accounts.

Trunova later reported that a criminal case was eventually opened—into the man’s death at the distribution center.

Forced conscription in Ukraine has long since ceased to be a myth. For a year and a half, it has been part of the everyday reality faced by Ukrainian men and their families. In Ukrainian cities, checkpoints and mobile teams from Territorial Recruitment Centers (TCCs) operate on the streets, where officers check documents and, in some cases, use physical force. Social media and local news outlets regularly publish videos showing men being detained at bus stops, near shopping malls, or at metro entrances, then forcibly taken to district enlistment offices.

Open sources contain hundreds of accounts of such incidents. Reports of severe injuries and deaths among conscripts in distribution centers have become not isolated but routine. These stories are fueling growing public frustration, especially amid reports of corruption within military enlistment offices and news that certain officials, lawmakers, or activists have been allowed to travel abroad freely. The contrast between street detentions and the ability of the well-connected or wealthy to avoid conscription deepens the sense of injustice and erodes trust in state institutions.

The head of the parliamentary committee on information policy, Mykyta Poturaiev, stated that most videos depicting cases of forced conscription in Ukraine are fabricated using artificial intelligence.

“Of course, individual violations of the law occur, and those responsible are held accountable. But recently, civil society organizations monitoring the information space conducted a large-scale AI-based analysis of videos related to the work of the Territorial Recruitment Centers. It turned out that almost all of them are fake. Almost all! Many were filmed outside Ukraine, in temporarily occupied territories, or generated entirely by artificial intelligence. They are simply deepfakes,” Poturaiev said.

The problem is not that Ukrainians are unwilling to defend their country. In the early years of the war, thousands of volunteers came to enlistment offices and went to the front without being summoned. Today’s frustration stems from a sense of injustice—the feeling that the state fails to ensure fair rules and respectful treatment for those it sends to fight. Systemic corruption in the Territorial Recruitment Centers, selective mobilization practices, and a lack of transparent procedures have eroded trust even among those willing to serve.

A recent investigation by Hromadske revealed that the “Diia.City” program—created to support Ukraine’s IT sector—has been used by gambling companies to evade mobilization. According to journalists, firms linked to online casinos and even to Russian citizens obtained residency status and used it to secure deferments for employees. Among the examples cited are Favbet Tech, which received exemptions for about twenty workers, and G5 Holding Ukraine, part of an international group with Russian shareholders. As Hromadske noted, checks on the origins of capital and the activities of such companies are virtually nonexistent, turning a support program for the tech industry into a tool for draft evasion and a cover for dubious business practices.

When such cases are uncovered within state programs and major companies, the situation at the grassroots level appears even more chaotic. Here, decisions are often driven not by law but by money or connections. There are widespread reports of recruitment officers demanding bribes for deferments or exemptions from service, while oversight mechanisms are effectively absent. The lower the level, the greater the arbitrariness and the weaker the accountability—from street detentions to closed distribution centers where it is impossible to determine what happens to those conscripted.

Leading Ukrainian media outlets have largely avoided the topic of forced conscription. Most newsrooms prefer to ignore or even justify it—much like Daryna Trunova did, until it touched someone in her own circle.

Such silence creates a normalization effect—when incidents that should be considered exceptional begin to seem routine. Forced detentions on the streets, police refusals to open criminal cases, deaths in distribution centers—all of this is gradually ceasing to provoke public reaction. It raises a question: in what European country could such practices continue for so long without direct government intervention?

Equally telling is that Western publications, which closely follow events in Ukraine, have scarcely mentioned this aspect of the war. Although recent reports by the Council of Europe and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have documented systemic human rights violations under martial law, the issue remains at the margins of international attention—with little public or political debate.