Russia press-gangs men in occupied territories of Ukraine

KYIV -- It is becoming increasingly dangerous for Ukrainian men to live in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine, with the Kremlin actively drafting the male population in the captured regions in defiance of international law.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, forcible conscription of Ukrainians in the occupied territories has been growing "exponentially", according to the Ukrainian National Resistance Center, which Ukrainian special forces created.

"The occupiers have a huge need for manpower," a spokesperson for the National Resistance Center who is code-named Ostap told Caravanserai. (Kyiv prohibits disclosing the real names of the organization's staff.)

"This is all being done with brutal, repressive actions," he said.

'It's forced conscription'

Since mid-2022, Russian forces have been barring men from entering and leaving captured cities and towns, Ostap said. The deeper the town is inside captured territories, the harder it is to leave.

"Whenever they try to leave, men are given a draft notice and they're conscripted forcibly," Ostap said.

Ukrainian military intelligence said that 60,000 Ukrainians have been press-ganged into the Russian military since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

"It's forced conscription: the occupiers caught men in the streets or went to the few businesses still operating and forcibly took men away," Andriy Chernyak, a spokesperson for Ukrainian military intelligence, said in a July 30 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty interview.

"They simply put them in uniforms and sent them to the front. They said to the Ukrainians, 'We promise you'll be on the second or third line,' but men have actually ended up on the front line," he said.

Rights activists have confirmed the statistics reported by the security agency.

"Sixty thousand is a realistic number," Alyona Luneva, advocacy manager at the ZMINA Human Rights Centre in Kyiv, told Caravanserai.

ZMINA is investigating forced conscription of inhabitants of occupied territories. The organization has documented cases of men being dragged off the street, said Luneva.

"For example, when they are leaving a factory or mine at the end of a shift, some of them might head to a bus stop. While they're waiting, a car drives up and they get thrown into the car and taken to the draft bureau," she said.

'How do you exist in a situation like that?'

"The Russian army treats the drafted Ukrainians like second-class citizens," Luneva said.

The Russians show no pity, she said, and dispatch residents of the occupied territories to the most punishing areas at the front as if they are cannon fodder.

"We're advising men to hide and, if they can, to leave the captured territories," Luneva said.

As soon as a region comes under occupation, a so-called military registration desk opens, said Pavel Lisyansky, director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Security.

The new office registers men "under the threat of imprisonment," he said. "There are no options."

"If you don't want to be registered, you're held for 30 days," Lisyansky told Caravanserai.

Many residents of the occupied territories are now turning to his organization for help, he said.

"I personally talked to one woman who came to us. She didn't know what to do. She lives in Torez [now Chystiakove], in the suburbs of occupied Donetsk, with her husband, daughter and son. Her husband worked in the mine, and everything was fine, until the Russians showed up and drafted her son," he said.

"Then her husband went to submit documents to the draft bureau, and he was also drafted. Ultimately her husband was killed, and her son disappeared."

"How do you exist in a situation like that?"

The Soviet playbook

Russia does not even view forced conscription as a crime, say analysts.

Russian officials "think these are Russian citizens, so all the laws they've now passed on conscription also apply to the [residents] of the occupied territories," said Viktor Yahun, director of the Agency for Security Sector Reform and a former deputy director of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

These tactics are taken from the Soviet Union's playbook.

Russia did not invent any new procedures and is simply repeating the tactics of the Soviet Union, Yahun told Caravanserai.

"My grandfather was a citizen of the kingdom of Romania. When the Soviets arrived there in the 1940s, they didn't ask if he wanted to be a Soviet citizen. They just drafted him and sent him to the front. So you see, this is a typical practice for the Russians that has always existed," Yahun said.

Forced conscription will worsen as time wears on, predict observers.

"The world already witnessed this during World War II, when men in captured territories were sent to the front immediately without even being given uniforms," Yahun said.

"I think the only way out is to surrender [to the Ukrainian army] because there's nowhere to escape," he said.

Ukrainian law enforcement needs to take into account that someone was press-ganged and consider whether he committed crimes against Ukraine when he served with the Russian army, said Luneva of ZMINA.

Sooner or later Russia will be punished for violating the rules of war, she said.

"We need to remember that according to the Rome Statute, forcible conscription is a war crime, and there are Ukrainian courts that have already issued sentences against draft officers in Crimea who organized a similar process to enlist soldiers from among the Ukrainian population," Luneva said, referring to a 1998 International Criminal Court statute.