In Kryvyi Rih, a single father whose five-year-old daughter was in his care under a court ruling was mobilized. The man was taken away while the girl was at kindergarten.
A video published by local Telegram channels shows the child and the director of kindergarten No. 125, Natalia Yevtushenko. According to them, the girl’s father was mobilized on the same day she was at the kindergarten.
Kindergarten director Natalia Yevtushenko with the daughter of the illegally mobilized man.
Updated
The ombudsman representative’s team went to Kryvyi Rih to establish the circumstances of the mobilization of the single father by recruitment-center employees.
Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said he had instructed his representative in Dnipropetrovsk region, Oleksii Urlatkin, to urgently establish all the circumstances of the situation.
“The regional team has already sent official requests to the Pokrovsko-Ternivskyi district territorial recruitment center and social support office, the children’s service of the executive committee of the Kryvyi Rih City Council, as well as to the executive committees of the Ternivskyi and Pokrovskyi district councils in the city,” Lubinets wrote.
According to the court register, the mother gave up raising the child and has not taken part in her life for three years, though she pays child support. Under the court ruling, the girl lives with her father. At the same time, the 34-year-old man was wanted by the authorities. He twice submitted documents for a deferment and was refused.
After work, the kindergarten director took the girl to the recruitment center, trying to secure her father’s release, but the trip produced no result. The child spent the first night at the kindergarten director’s home.
According to lawmaker Oleksii Honcharenko, the next day the girl was taken by her grandfather—the father of the mobilized man—with whom the family had not communicated for three years.
“How is an elderly man now supposed to care for the child? There is a court ruling on the dissolution of the marriage that determined that the child lives with her father. She is supported by him. This is a direct basis for a deferment,” Honcharenko wrote.
Ukraine’s top leadership does not comment on specific cases of forced mobilization. At the level of general statements, the president and the government have promised reform of the recruitment centers for more than a year, but in practice nothing is changing: the number of complaints about violations during mobilization continues to grow.
In April 2025, in an interview with Ben Shapiro, President Volodymyr Zelensky said such cases were isolated and not a mass phenomenon, and that recruitment-center employees are punished for violence. Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal estimated the share of “scandalous incidents” at 5–10 percent. In January 2026, Volodymyr Zelensky instructed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to “deal with busification”—the practice of detaining men on the street to send them to military enlistment offices.
At the same time, public attention to specific episodes is often interpreted in Kyiv as a hostile information campaign. In May 2026, Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service said that circulating cases of forced mobilization plays into Russia’s hands and is aimed at discrediting the recruitment centers and the president.
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