I might look like an ass, but I’m sick of the war in Ukraine, which is also in Russia these days. I supported Ukraine from day one, and I’ve been horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military. But I’ve also been more and more disappointed by the everlasting grotesque corruption in Ukraine. Furthermore, the abuses of the military seem to have reached a point where one could ask oneself whether Ukraine hasn’t already become almost like Russia, only without Putin!

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📰 Al Jazeera, on Aug. 19, 2026: In Ukraine, forcible military recruitment efforts escalate into violence: ‘Busification’, the term describing being captured on the street, is engulfed by abuse and corruption.

Anton was walking home with a friend in Kyiv when he was suddenly seized and forced into the back seat of a police car, with an officer on each side, heading towards a future that would likely see him in the trenches.

The 52-year-old, who requested to withhold his surname to protect his identity, has supported Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but did not want to be sent to the front line. The grinding attrition of war seemed like a death sentence given his health issues. He is HIV-positive and has arthritis and poor eyesight – conditions that he believed made him medically unfit to serve.

But since mobilisation laws took effect in May 2024, Ukraine’s recruitment officers have been ambushing men on the street.

In late January, when he was allegedly captured, he had been avoiding venturing out of his apartment block – fearful of both Ukraine’s controversial conscription drive and Russian drone attacks on his neighbourhood.

But on one of the few times he did leave his home, the police jumped out of a car that was parked in a residential garage and chased him, he said.

…

After undergoing medical tests, he was transferred to a military recruitment centre on the outskirts of the city, where he would spend two days in a room with barred windows, a bucket of cold pasta, and no way to contact the outside world.

What happened to Anton has a term in Ukraine – “busification” – men stopped on city streets, checked for exemption cards, and placed directly onto buses bound for mobilisation centres.

According to observers, as Ukraine’s conscription crisis grows, it is increasingly common.

On the streets, resistance against the recruitment officers has also turned physical, and on occasion, deadly.

Within the space of three days in February, a draft officer was shot dead at a petrol station in Poltava oblast, an explosion inside a draft office in Rivne killed one person and wounded six, and another blast wounded one at an enlistment office in Pavlohrad. Ukraine’s Security Service later said Russia had recruited the perpetrator of the Rivne bombing.

At the military recruitment centre, Anton watched on as young men arrived, freshly caught from the streets with stories to tell.

One man told him he had been seized hours earlier, as he prepared to drive his wife to hospital to give birth to their first child.

…

As recruitment officers began parcelling the men out to military units, Anton discovered that his HIV status had been withheld from the commanders they were being offered to – information that, once revealed, saw him deemed too unwell to serve.

He was eventually released, but said it cost him $5,000 in lawyers’ fees to walk free on a conditional summons, and a further $30,000 paid to fixers who promised to secure his documents and then vanished.

He is now confined to his home, afraid to step outside.

…

In the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion, initial battlefield successes and a wave of patriotism led to hundreds of thousands volunteering to serve, but after a failed counteroffensive in 2023, recruitment became difficult, and tactics hardened.

Two laws signed in April 2024 lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, quintupled fines for evasion, and dropped a promised provision that would have allowed soldiers to demobilise after 36 months of service, leaving those already fighting with no fixed end to their duty.

Men have reportedly been taken from a range of sites.

In October 2024, footage outside a concert at Kyiv’s Palace of Sports showed officers dragging a man across the pavement as onlookers chanted “Shame!”

In the western city of Uzhhorod, a man was rounded up as he left Sunday mass despite carrying papers proving he was the sole carer for his disabled mother.

Corruption in the recruitment process has been alleged. In some cases, men have obtained exemptions through paid-for medical diagnoses.

In October 2024, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned after journalists reported that dozens of prosecutors in the western Khmelnytskyi region held disability status to avoid the draft.

The scandal proved to be the tip of the iceberg: Ukraine’s security service announced it had cancelled 4,106 fake disability certificates issued through corrupt medical examination commissions that year, charging 64 commission officials in the process.

Then, in January 2025, the chief psychiatrist of Ukraine’s armed forces – a senior member of the central military medical commission that decides whether conscripts are fit to serve – was arrested for illegal enrichment, having accumulated a house, apartments in Kyiv and Odesa, land, and four luxury cars worth more than $1m since the invasion began.

Investigators searching his home found $152,000 and 34,000 euros in cash.

‘Systematic and large-scale’

The alleged abuses have been documented internationally.

In a memorandum published on July 8, 2025, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights raised alarm over mobilisation practices, including beatings, harsh detentions, denial of access to lawyers, and the conscription of men with disabilities, citing Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, who had described the violations as “systematic and large-scale”.

This has affected public opinion.

According to a July 2025 survey by Ukraine’s Rating Group, only 24 percent of Ukrainians said they trusted enlistment officers.

…

Attacks on recruitment officers

More than 600 attacks on enlistment officers have been recorded since the start of the war, with assaults nearly tripling in 2025.

The first four months of 2026 alone saw 117 – more than 20 times the five recorded in the war’s entire first year.

Anger has boiled over.

On July 8, 2026, a crowd in Lviv’s Sykhiv district blocked, damaged and overturned a recruitment service vehicle during the detention of a man wanted for draft evasion, prompting pre-trial investigations by the national police and the Security Service of Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued that the only beneficiary of such scenes is Russia.

Yet the condemnations have also been tempered with concessions by institutions like the Defence Ministry, which conceded that mobilisation methods need improvement.

Oleksandr Syrskii, who was sacked as the country’s commander-in-chief last month along with the defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, also acknowledged the army was working to correct mistakes and prevent rights violations at enlistment offices.

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A few days ago, I heard a talk on Radio România Actualități featuring a Romanian from Cernăuți (Чернівці), Ukraine. That guy candidly told of the accusations against the sacked Syrskii: that he was accused of having organized some special units that did I don’t know what, and that “the street” was angry regarding the abuses related to those forced recruitments. But look, Zelenskyy eventually dismissed him, so “it’s a good sign that democratic mechanisms function even in a society that couldn’t organize elections because of the war!”

No shit, Sherlock? The country is rife with abuse and corruption, but it’s OK?!

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Side note: While I was writing this in WordPress, Grammarly failed to detect a “could’t” occurrence but was keen to offer such a suggestion:

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📰 The Kyiv Independent, July 31, 2026: Ukraine’s assault regiments ordered to halt recruitment amid allegations of misconduct, media reports.

Newly appointed Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi ordered assault regiments of Ukraine’s Ground Forces to temporarily suspend recruitment on July 26, Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported on July 31, citing sources in four units.

The reported order comes amid a series of media investigations into alleged mistreatment of soldiers and non-combat deaths in the 425th and 225th assault regiments, which were often directly subordinate to former Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on the battlefield. The units, however, have also been tasked with some of the most dangerous missions on the battlefield and have sustained significant losses.

…

Ukrainska Pravda reported that at least two assault regiments — the 425th, also known as Skelia, and the 225th — had exclusive authorization to continuously replenish and expand their ranks. At the same time, other assault units, including the 1st Separate Assault Regiment and the 475th Assault Regiment, did not have the same authorization despite their battlefield effectiveness, the outlet reported, citing sources.

Two investigations published by Ukrainian media outlets this summer examined alleged mistreatment of soldiers in the 425th and 225th regiments.

The Ukrainian outlet Texty reported that Oleh Shyriaiev, commander of Ukraine’s 225th Assault Regiment, allegedly ordered troops to open fire on fellow soldiers who were retreating.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian outlet Babel reported that the 425th Assault Regiment had seen more than 30 non-combat deaths among Ukrainian soldiers, which the outlet linked to inadequate service conditions and alleged abuse.

Following the publication of the investigation on June 23, Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (DBR) launched a pretrial investigation into allegations of torture and deaths among mobilized soldiers in the regiment. The commander of the Skelia regiment, Yurii Harkavyi, is also suspended while the investigation is underway.

Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation charged two service members from the medical unit of the 425th Assault Regiment with allegedly torturing and unlawfully detaining two fellow soldiers, the agency said on July 28.

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Now, please tell me how Ukraine is not like Russia?

Yes, in Russia there is much more bestiality, barbarism, savagery, inhumanity—whatever you want to call it. But we were supposed to believe that Ukrainians are different. Different, my ass.

Even the common mantra (repeated by that guy from Чернівці) that “the lifespan of a Russian soldier on the frontline is about 20 to 25 minutes” is likely to be pure propaganda. Nobody knows the exact number of deaths on either side, and in that other mantra, namely “Russia has more than one million dead and wounded,” they add apples and oranges because, in a war, both parties are using propaganda as a weapon.

I cannot understand how, four and a half years into this war, they keep “discovering” corruption in the government and in the military of Ukraine! We constantly learn of arrests and dismissals, but nothing changes! For fuck’s sake, this is a war! Establish courts-martial to try such people and to sentence them to death by shooting!

Instead, Ukraine is more concerned with … adhering to the European Union! I beg your pardon?! You’re fucking rotten and in an eternal war, yet you want to bring war and corruption to a non-military organization whose members are already half-dead economically and structurally because they relied on Russia for gas, they relied on the US for defense, and they rely on China for manufactured products, including solar panels and batteries? We can commit suicide by ourselves, thank you!

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The Ukrainian oblasts of Dobas cannot be fully occupied by Russia, but they cannot be liberated by Ukraine, either. This war of attrition can go on forever.

So the war has transformed into a war of terror. First by Russia, then by Ukraine. Each of Russia and Ukraine trades 500-600 long-range drones a day, every single day, because the small FPV quadcopters are mainly used to kill individual targets in Donbas, and nobody counts them anymore. Add to this the ballistic missiles that Ukraine can no longer intercept for lack of Patriot interceptors—the Retarded Orange’s war with Iran severely depleted the global reserve of such surface-to-air missiles.

Do you remember how Russia has attacked civilian and energy infrastructure in Ukraine since the beginning of the war? Well, this is exactly what Ukraine does now in retaliation! Officially, they don’t target civilians, who remain collateral victims, but I cannot accept the lie that the attacks on the Wildberries warehouses are justified by the fact that they also deliver dual-use or military items! By this logic, everything in Russia is a legitimate target, even an industrial bakery, because bread also feeds the military!

In truth, Ukraine wants Russians to feel what war is like. They want Russians to stop pretending they are “neutral” towards the war, or that they “trust their president” and just go on with their lives.

On the one hand, the attacks on refineries have proven to be more effective in disrupting the Russian economy than the 30 or so rounds of EU half-hearted sanctions.

On the other hand, the entire Russian population cannot be held responsible for their complacency towards an authoritarian regime that almost brought the country back to Stalinism. Not all Russians love Vladimir Vladimirovich, but it’s too late to try to remove him from power.

Putin was elected to his first term as President on March 26, 2000, so the people had a quarter of a century to oppose him instead of submitting to him, right? OK, the Russians did nothing to stop Putin, but what did the West do? Does the name of Gerhard Schröder ring a bell?

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This war is going nowhere precisely because the West didn’t do the right thing in 2014, and the West didn’t do the right thing in 2022.

📖 “Talkers are no good doers.” (Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, Scene 3)

But there is no way back now. Putin’s Russia is a mad rogue state that wants to destroy the collective West, while claiming that the collective West wants to destroy Russia. We can no longer pretend that Russia is “a country like many others, only a bit less democratic.” That’s Turkey, for instance. Or the genocidal Israel. Russia is a different category in itself!

Therefore, what I care about is that Russia wants to destroy us, not that it wants to crush Ukraine! What with the constant level of corruption and abuse in Ukraine, I stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy.

This war has to stop, and I literally don’t care how this happens. Blame Europe, blame the US, blame Trump, lament Ukraine—I just don’t care how this ends, as long as it ends sooner rather than later.

Perhaps the best course of action for the West would have been to stop acting as though they cared as early as 2014. Instead of the Minsk I and II agreements, which practically no one wanted to follow, everyone should have agreed to hand over the Donbas to Russia and move on.