Ukraine's conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody

The war in Ukraine has been defined by periodic bursts of certainty that Russia is on the back foot, if not close to collapse, and that Ukraine, conversely, is inches away from victory. We appear to be in the middle of one of these moments of euphoria now.

Finnish President Alexander Stubb has declared that Ukraine is “on top” and “in a much better place than it has been at any stage in this horrific war,” charging that Russia is unable to recruit enough soldiers to make up for those it’s losing. Ukrainians have “a growing self-confidence” on account of the territory they have supposedly retaken, as one former U.S. ambassador put it, and their growing confidence over military advances “is strikingly higher today than a year ago,” charged another. A spate of reports have it that the walls are closing in on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Ukrainian military breakthrough is imminent, in other words, and Ukraine’s population remains committed to endless fighting. But this is hard to square with Ukraine’s growing recruitment crisis, most viscerally embodied by the growing violent resistance to its policy of forced conscription.

For years now, videos have circulated of ordinary Ukrainians being “recruited” for military service — or, put more bluntly, being snatched by sometimes masked men from the streets or their homes, and dragged into a minivan to be driven away. It is part of a war mobilization effort that has been wracked with controversy, including a series of bribery scandals going back years, widespread allegations of abuse, and the drafting of mentally and physically disabled men.

Unsurprisingly, forced conscription has been unpopular. A petition calling for the end of mobilization in public places quickly passed the 25,000-signature threshold for a presidential response. Before long, recruitment officers started facing angry protests from local communities. Last year, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets publicly labeled it a “coercive system” and revealed that complaints against enlistment officers with the Territorial Recruitment Centers (TRC) had exploded more than 33,000% since the start of the war — from just 18 in 2022 to more than 6,000 in 2025.

As the war has gone on, civil disobedience against conscription practices has turned increasingly violent. The year 2025 was bookended by killings of draft officers. At the close of January, a man showed up at a military training center and shot dead a TRC officer who had “recruited” an acquaintance of his. In December, a draft officer was fatally stabbed in the groin by a man whose papers he asked to see, and who went on to attack three other officers before fleeing.

As the Kyiv Independent, hardly an antiwar outlet, noted in its report on the stabbing, videos of violent “recruitment” practices were “initially dismissed as an exaggeration fuelled by Russian disinformation networks,” but were in reality widespread thanks to Ukraine’s manpower shortage and a sharp drop in voluntary enlistment. December also saw a group of people attack TRC officers trying to check their papers, leaving one with a broken rib.

The violence has only escalated this year. The end of this past January saw a man kill a draft officer and escape with one of the conscripts he was escorting. February saw at least two separate attacks on TRC officers in Kharkiv and in the Lviv Oblast, with the latter suspected by police of trying to help a conscript escape. A month later, a group ran a minivan driven by recruiters off the road and broke in to free the conscript they were transporting.

The first week of April saw three stabbings in four days, including a recruiter pierced in the neck by a customs officer whose brother he and his colleagues allegedly tried to forcibly mobilize. A few days later, a group of teenagers attacked TRC officers to protect a man they were trying to conscript, and the month ended with a 48-year-old soldier going AWOL and firing an automatic weapon at a car that TRC officers and a policeman were in, sending two to the hospital. Only a few days ago, an alleged draft-dodger sent two more recruiters to the hospital in serious condition, stabbing them after they tried to check his papers.

According to government figures, these incidents are just a handful of more than 600 attacks on enlistment officers carried out since the start of the war, with the number of assaults nearly tripling from 2024 to 2025, when 341 were recorded. The first four months of 2026 alone have seen at least 117 attacks, more than 20 times the five that were recorded in the war’s entire first year.

How, then, does this square with polling that has tended to show, even recently, a Ukrainian population willing to fight indefinitely until military victory?

“Almost all of those polls are exclusively in the territory under the control of the Ukrainian government,” says Volodymyr Ishchenko, research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. “That means they don’t poll Ukrainians in Crimea, in Donbas, in the occupied territories, in the EU, or Ukrainians who went to Russia as refugees, and there are millions of them.”

Other metrics point to a silent reluctance to fight. Ukraine’s own defense minister revealed this year that there were 2 million draft dodgers and 200,000 cases of desertion. While voluntary enlistment drove the war’s early months, conscription is now responsible for 70% of recruitment. Ukrainian nationals who fled to Europe at the start of the war have resisted European efforts to send them back, in some cases to be drafted at the Ukrainian government’s request.

While affluent Ukrainians are able to bribe their way out of being conscripted, the commander of Ukraine’s National Guard has urged those who “have money problems” to join the military. According to one analysis of Ukrainian casualty figures, the vast majority of those killed in action come disproportionately from small towns, where poverty rates tended to be higher.

What’s at stake is more than whether Ukraine wins or loses. The prolongation of the war has created and intensified a severe economic and demographic crisis for Ukraine that threatens its future as a stable and functioning state. Last week, the head of Ukraine’s Office of Migration Policy estimated that 70% of those abroad may not return to the country, threatening labor shortages in critical sectors. The Ukrainian state, which already is kept afloat through massive loans from Europe, owes an unsustainable debt worth many billions of euros to the families of dead soldiers, whose numbers have ballooned.

Much of this is unknown to Western publics. English-language reports about violent resistance to conscription are dwarfed by stories claiming Russia is faltering. Some Ukrainian-language reports about the country’s recruitment and demographic crises are simply never translated to English. And so, those who most ardently back Ukraine unwittingly cheer policies that ensure its gradual destruction.