Complaints About TCC Units Have Increased 340-Fold in Three Years

Oleh was 55. A former law enforcement officer, he lived with his 18-year-old daughter. On the evening of February 6, he went out to walk the dog—and never came back.

His body was found the next day. According to the forensic report, he died of a head injury. Relatives reviewing surveillance footage saw that a black car stopped near the place where Oleh had been walking, men in TCC uniform ran out of it, and then a minibus with its doors open appeared. What happened next was not captured by the cameras because of the darkness.

The police established the involvement of three TCC servicemen and seized a vehicle bearing traces of the victim’s blood. All three were detained, and the court remanded them in custody without the option of bail.

Two days after Oleh’s death, Commissioner Lubinets issued a public statement: TCC employees have no right to detain, arrest, or hold citizens—doing so is a violation of the Constitution. The ombudsman’s words sounded like a direct comment on what had happened, even if formally they referred to the broader practice.

Serhii’s wife, Valentyna, says her husband was attacked by men in balaclavas with no patches or identifying insignia. Witnesses saw him lying on the ground with a man in a balaclava standing over him. Serhii was then forced into a minibus and taken away. Eyewitness videos show this.

Valentyna tracked her husband through his phone’s geolocation. She was not allowed into one of the hospitals. About 40 minutes later, an ambulance arrived there, and Serhii was handed over to medics. As of April 8, he had been in a coma for 14 days. The diagnosis is a severe closed traumatic brain injury, and surgery has been performed.

The regional TCC’s version is that the man fell on his own in the dark while running from a notification team. The center’s spokeswoman, Olena Kuzina, said servicemen found him sitting on wet asphalt and called an ambulance. Valentyna rejects that account: “If a person trips and falls, there should be damage to the clothes, abrasions. There is nothing like that.” Yet this is an injury that led to a coma and emergency surgery. There is still no explanation of how a single fall could have caused such an outcome.

A criminal case has been opened, and an investigation is underway.

A criminal case has been opened, and an investigation is underway. According to Valentyna, who runs a Telegram channel with updates on her husband’s condition, investigators are considering the possibility of classifying what happened as the unintentional infliction of bodily harm. At the time this article was published, Serhii had been in a coma for 15 days.

This is not a statistical anomaly. It is a trajectory.

Even so, these figures cover only documented appeals—cases in which the victim or their relatives deliberately turned to the ombudsman or the police. The real scale of the abuses is, by all appearances, considerably broader.

Ukrainian Telegram channels and public pages regularly publish videos of violent detentions, beatings, and confrontations involving TCC personnel—material that never becomes an official complaint and never enters any statistics.

The ombudsman’s figures reflect only the share of what is happening that people chose to document and bring to the state.

Current law does not grant TCCs the authority to detain or forcibly bring in citizens. This is explicitly codified: the detention of civilians falls exclusively within the police’s jurisdiction. Ombudsman Lubinets publicly reaffirmed this after Oleh’s death.

Yet violent street detentions involving minibuses and physical coercion are documented everywhere—and remain virtually consequence-free for those responsible.

One telling example came in December 2024 in Vyshhorod, in Kyiv region. In a video that spread across Ukrainian public pages, TCC personnel and police officers pump gas into a car where a man believed to be liable for military service is allegedly inside, then set it alight—to force the passenger out. The official internal investigation found no violations on the part of the TCC personnel. According to the formal conclusion, it was the victim himself who ignited the gas.

The authenticity of the recording was not disputed.

Some of the reform proposals now being discussed in parliament are aimed precisely at this: limiting summons to TCCs to personal delivery of a draft notice or dispatch by mail, and banning detentions without police involvement.

But that restriction already exists in law. The issue is not the absence of the necessary norms—it is why the norms already in force do not work. The reform, so far, offers no answer.

In April 2026, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the president’s office, put it bluntly: no one should expect “miracles” from renaming TCCs or changing their operating format—the substance of the process will remain the same. Mobilization is chaotic by nature, he said, and under the conditions of an ongoing war it is impossible to change that fundamentally.

“There is a minimum plan: a minimum number of people who must come in order to sustain the front. There is no middle ground between these two realities. None at all. So if people do not come, they will have to be mobilized,” he said.

It is hard to imagine the head of a presidential administration in any EU country or in the United States publicly saying: the system operates in violation of the law, but there is no other way—and for that to be treated as an acceptable statement. In the Ukrainian context, it passed almost unnoticed.

The authorities have no single position—and both versions are convenient.

Some officials, like Budanov, acknowledge the chaos and explain it away as a military necessity. That relieves the system of responsibility: yes, violations exist, but there is a war.

Others deny the problem altogether. Videos showing beatings are dismissed as fakes or AI-generated fabrications, while abuses are described as a “statistical anomaly,” “no more than 1 percent” of all interactions.

While some say “chaos is inevitable” and others insist “there is no chaos at all,” people continue to be beaten, forced into minibuses, and found dead after going out to walk the dog.