Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi, in an interview with TSN, said Russia is testing a new mechanism for replenishing its army—the forced signing of military-service contracts. According to Syrskyi, special mobile groups are being used for this purpose, which “detain men and force them to sign a contract.”
TSN
“This experiment is being conducted in Penza region,” the commander-in-chief said, adding that this is a test of a model the Russian command plans to extend across the entire country.
Reports of mass roundups of men in Penza region did indeed appear in June. According to the human-rights project Movement of Conscientious Objectors and local Telegram channels, law-enforcement officers and military enlistment offices are stopping men on the streets, on public transport and during road checks, then forcing them to sign a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry. Relatives of detainees report cases of beatings. The regional Interior Ministry department describes what is happening as planned raids to find people who have not registered for military service.
A practice similar in description has been operating in Ukraine at least since the spring of 2024. After a law tightening mobilization was signed in April of that year, employees of territorial recruitment centers began stopping men of conscription age on the streets and forcibly taking them to military enlistment offices. The phenomenon became known as “busification” and was named the 2024 word of the year by Myslovo, the dictionary of modern Ukrainian. From the start of the full-scale invasion through the end of August 2024, the State Bureau of Investigation opened more than 400 criminal cases over abuse of authority by recruitment-center employees; only 10 people received convictions in those cases.
President Volodymyr Zelensky in early 2024 called the practice of detaining men on the streets “very wrong,” but after the mobilization law was adopted it did not stop, and only intensified.
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