The draft dodgers who’re ‘despised’ in Ukraine
The wig is knotted and ill-fitting. The calf-length black skirt is rather frumpy – and the less said about what’s been stuffed down the front of the green polo shirt, the better.
All told, the muscular 44-year-old man looks rather sheepish – not to say ridiculous – standing beside two heavily armed guards metres from the Ukrainian-Romanian border.
A resident from the town of Zolotonosha, he had hoped to escape Ukraine, which does not allow men aged between 18 and 60 to leave the country, by using his sister’s passport and unconvincingly disguising himself as a woman.
Yet he will now surely be sent to the front. The cross-dresser, captured on military video last month, is among a growing number of Ukrainian men desperately trying to dodge the draft by fleeing the country.
A 44-year-old man dresses in women’s clothes and a wig in an attempt to evade conscription
As Ukraine endures its third year of war, it is finding itself increasingly outmanned and outgunned by Russia, whose forces are currently battering the defenders’ second city, Kharkiv.
Two weeks ago new mobilisation laws came into effect, forcing all eligible men aged 18-60 to update their personal details with the military. The age of conscription was lowered from 27 to 25 (the upper limit is 60), certain medical exemptions were scrapped and draft-dodgers face tougher sanctions. It has proven to be politically poisonous.
To avoid conscription, some have attempted to illegally cross the heavily policed Ukrainian borders by foot, others are paying thousands of pounds for forged ‘white ticket’ exemption papers confirming they are unfit for service. Many are hiding in plain sight vowing that they would rather go to prison than fight on the eastern front.
At least 33 men have drowned trying to cross the freezing Tysa river into Romania since the war began.
On May 7 alone, three men – one aged just 20 – died while trying to escape this way.
In Kyiv, one man with dual nationality who asks to remain anonymous, tells me he has tried to leave Ukraine twice using his Australian passport – but was turned away at the border by authorities.
Police are aware of almost 100,000 men that are attempting to evade the draft by failing to visit their local army recruitment centres having been served their call-up papers.
So far, 20,000 draft-dodgers have been caught by authorities who prowl streets, train stations and gyms in search of eligible men to send to the front.
Sabrina Miller travels to Ukraine as it endures the third year of Russia’s invasion
The issue of conscription has become increasingly fraught for president Volodymyr Zelensky, who in December claimed that army commanders were demanding 500,000 new recruits to replenish Ukraine’s battered frontlines.
Roughly one million men currently serve in the Ukrainian armed forces, where the average age of a soldier is around 43 – but best estimates suggest tens of thousands have been killed since the full-scale war began in February 2022.
As the late-spring sun beats down on Ukraine’s iron-hearted capital city, it is hard not to notice the scars of war.
The streets seem bereft of healthy young men. Wailing rocket sirens cut through the quiet night air and the rusting remains of buildings, struck by missiles or debris, are ignored by passersby.
Women are both worn and worried: most of their husbands, brothers and sons are risking their lives on the frontlines.
But some men – such as Olexandr, a 33-year-old engineer – are determined to avoid the draft.
Photographer Jamie Wiseman and I discreetly meet him on a wooden park bench opposite the National University of Kyiv.
‘I am very concerned for my own life,’ he explains. Olexandr believes that the war was started by ‘politicians who cannot agree with each other and it is ordinary people like me who are being asked to pay with our lives’.
‘My friends who have already served on the front lines have been disabled for life by this fighting.
‘I have heard horror stories about newly mobilised soldiers who are not being given proper equipment and are being told to fundraise the money to buy it themselves.’
Women are both worn and worried: most of their husbands, brothers and sons are risking their lives on the frontlines. But some men are determined to avoid the draft, Sabrina Miller writes
A street in the country’s capital is painted with a sign calling for those of fighting age to sign up
Such rumours are seized on by Russian propagandists who post videos on social media sites including TikTok and Telegram claiming that Ukrainian officials are corrupt or that Ukraine is losing the war – in order to shatter morale and divide society.
These posts will often suggest that Ukrainian commanders do not care about the lives of soldiers, that Ukrainians should evade conscription or that the West has betrayed their country.
One TikTok video, which has almost 150,000 views, claims that the ‘Russian City of Mariupol’ is thriving since Putin’s forced seizure in May 2022 and that residents are much happier now they have been ‘liberated’ from Ukraine.
Other clips – promoted by fake accounts or ‘bots’ – show pictures of sprawling Ukrainian military cemeteries to frighten potential recruits and discourage them from serving.
Olexandr, who moved from Mariupol to Kyiv three months before the start of the war, has not updated his personal details, so officials cannot track him on government databases.
Men are detained while trying to escape conscription by crossing the border out of Ukraine
‘Because I moved here quickly I am invisible. My company, which is responsible for giving my information to the military authorities, won’t register me with them because they don’t want to lose me as an employee.
‘But I am always worried that I may be stopped by authorities and forcibly sent to the front.’
Increasingly, thuggish recruitment officers have been spotted brutishly forcing men to enlist.
A video shared widely on Ukrainian Telegram channels shows a gang of masked officers in khaki military uniforms violently dragging a man off a public bus into a waiting van.
Another video filmed in Kyiv shows a group of at least four police officers – two wearing high-vis jackets – roughly snatching a young man off the streets and bundling him into a blacked-out car.
Olexandr claims these videos show military officials ‘kidnapping’ civilians and forcing them to join the army. (The Mail has not been able to verify his claims.)
To avoid a similar fate, he takes extensive personal security measures to mitigate the risks of being detected, stopped or seized by the authorities.
As we’re talking, missile sirens ring through the streets of Kyiv warning residents to seek shelter.
Nobody flinches, despite the fact the children’s playground just behind us was struck by rocket debris a few months earlier.
Ukraine’s losses have been heavy. Estimates suggest tens of thousands have been killed since the war began in February 2022
‘Every morning I wake up at 6.30am and I check the Telegram channels which warn people where recruitment officers are so I know which streets to avoid,’ says Olexandr.
‘My work sends a car to pick me up from my home and drive me straight to the office along a discreet route.
‘I only leave late at night when the recruitment officers have gone home. But I feel desperate and depressed when I think about this war. It is unlikely I will avoid the draft forever. It is sad to think about how long this war will last for.’
Like Olexandr, draft-dodgers are using Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, to track the locations of recruitment officers in a bid to avoid them.
One channel called ‘Call Up Notices Ukraine’, which has more than 240,000 subscribers, warns that ‘one crocodile’ (the code word for an army officer, due to the green colour of their uniform) and ‘two eggplants’ (the code word for police officers) are loitering in the shade in the district of Lukyanivka.
We head there and watch as two men in high-vis jackets and one man in camouflage army uniform approach, surround and interrogate young men as they exit a McDonald’s, before letting them go.
Olexandr worries that the government is becoming increasingly undemocratic and is slowly eroding the rights of ordinary people.
Marichka, 23, a cafe owner, dreams of becoming a paramedic in the military. ‘I despise the men dodging the draft,’ she says. ‘It’s the obligation of every man over 25 to fight in this war and to do their bit for the nation’
‘I am not a politician but we must look for the answers,’ he says. ‘Even with the support of our allies it will still be impossible to reclaim the territory we have lost. Getting just a small amount of land back will cost a huge number of lives. Maybe people are afraid to say this out loud – but I am not.’
His views are shared by Max*, 33, who is also refusing to fight. Jamie and I meet him in a cafe in downtown Kyiv.
Max – a project manager who tries to obscure his face with his hooded top – has seen first-hand the brutalising toll that war can take on a family.
‘My father served in Afghanistan in the 1980s and when he came back home it was clear he had PTSD. In 2014 he developed a severe alcohol problem.
‘Before his death the following year he told us that all the soldiers in Afghanistan were committing war crimes because it was what they were instructed to do.
‘It taught me that you don’t need to trust the state, especially when it comes to your health and your life. When I look at [our] soldiers I feel respect but I also feel a lot of pity for them; for how the state behaves towards them; for how they have been manipulated – and for how the Government does not support them or their families.’
But many Ukrainians feel resentment towards those refusing the draft through cowardice or selfishness, and failing to defend Ukraine against Putin’s bloodlust.
At Background Camp, a military training centre in a secret location outside Kyiv, 30 recruits openly tell me of their bitter frustration towards draft-dodgers.
As we drive down the bumpy dirt track towards the facility, drones hum above our heads and the crackle of gunfire echoes in the background.
As we arrive, a military advisor from the US is patiently teaching trainees how to hold a gun. It is the first time most of them have picked up a weapon.
New recruits at Background Camp, a military training centre in a secret location outside Kyiv
Among the recruits is Marichka, 23, a cafe owner, who now dreams of becoming a paramedic in the military.
Practising loading and reloading her AK-47 assault rifle, she is one of the 43,000 women in the Ukrainian armed forces.
‘Lots of my friends are fighting on the frontline,’ she tells us, ‘some of whom have died. I had a feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, which is why I volunteered.’
For those who haven’t signed up she is unsparing.
‘I despise the men dodging the draft,’ she says. ‘It’s the obligation of every man over 25 to fight in this war and to do their bit for the nation. And we cannot afford for people not to help and to avoid their responsibility.’
But she is under no illusions as to life on the frontline.
‘Only after I have spent time washing away the blood of fallen soldiers, will I truly understand the horrors of combat.’
With no end in sight for the war, many fear that the draft age will be lowered yet again and that women may soon be forced to enlist, as the men are.
Widening the recruitment net will help fill the trenches, but as recent experience has shown, it will burden jails and morgues too, as more people attempt to flee the war, or die trying.
*Some names have been changed.
