How Ukrainian military press gangs are grabbing citizens off the street ...Middle East

When Daryna Trunova, a journalist and presenter at Channel 24, a Ukrainian TV channel, heard that her friend’s son had been hospitalised after an incident at a military recruitment centre in Kyiv, she almost couldn’t believe it.

“If I hadn’t known this story myself, I would have thought it wasn’t true,” Trunova told The i Paper. “There’s so much Russian fake news, so much Russian propaganda, precisely on the topic of mobilisation.”

That young man was Roman Sopin, who on 18 October was taken from the street in Kyiv by conscription officers and brought to a centre that prepares troops for service. The following day, the 43-year-old was taken to hospital with a serious head wound and soon fell into a coma. Four days later, Sopin died from his injuries.

The Ukrainian military says Sopin lost consciousness, fell and hit his head. They state that a dozen witnesses corroborate this version of events.

His family and their lawyer, Oleksandr Protas, however, dispute this account. They believe the blunt-force trauma, haemorrhage and skull fractures listed on his death certificate indicate a deliberate act of violence.

His mother, Larysa Sopina, told The i Paper she was told over the phone about his injury. “They asked me, ‘Does he have epilepsy?’ I said, ‘No, he was healthy.’ Then, we understood that something happened that was not good.”

Ms Sopina went straight to the medical centre where her son had been taken. “When I saw him, it was too hard. He had tubes in his mouth, a head injury,” she said, then pauses. “Excuse me, I’ll try to speak, but my emotions are too much – it’s too hard.”

She called the police to give a witness statement but says they failed to investigate her claims. “They didn’t take my son’s clothes. Even today, no one has taken them.”

Mobilisation crisis

Sopin’s death is far from an isolated case. From Kyiv to the western city of Lviv and the southern port city of Odesa, there are thousands of videos of Ukrainian men being dragged from the street and forced into vans by alleged press gangs.

The website busification.org describes itself as “a video chronicle of mobilisation violations in Ukraine” and contains more than 5,000 videos of what are apparently brutal forced conscriptions. The platform says it verifies materials using digital forensics methods to confirm authenticity, including the absence of traces of editing or deepfakes. The i Paper has not been able to independently verify these videos.

Territorial Centres of Recruitment and Social Support (TCC) are responsible for managing conscription in Ukraine, and the unpopularity of their alleged tactics has risen sharply.

A Socis survey carried out between 3 and 9 February, obtained by The New Voice of Ukraine digital newspaper, found that almost 80 per cent of respondents said the current approach to conscription was unacceptable, with only 16 per cent agreeing it was necessary to defeat Russia.

Many Ukrainian men are anxious about being conscripted by TCC officers. A Ukrainian man of military age, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of this topic, left the country at the end of 2023 with a medical exemption.

He is sure he will be mobilised the moment he returns. “Definitely they will, unfortunately. Right now, I would say you need to have a serious disease or no legs [to not be mobilised]. Everybody is ‘healthy’,” he said.

One of his friends was recently taken on the street by TCC officers to be mobilised and potentially sent to the front line, he added. “He’s now in some kind of adjustment centre and has a couple of weeks before going to the front. He’s trying to figure out who to give money to just to get out of the place.”

The man says there is a rumour that you could pay $1,000 to officers on the street to avoid being conscripted, “but if you’re already at some TCC centre, it’s $10,000 to get out”.

The TCC has been accused of widespread corruption following arrests across the nation. In July, the police and Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) arrested the acting head of a recruitment centre in the Odesa region for soliciting a $1,500 bribe to remove a conscript from the wanted list.

In October 2024, the SSU detained three officials from the Holosiivskyi Kyiv TCC, who are alleged to have orchestrated a scheme to evade conscription. Luxury cars and more than $1.2m in cash were found during SSU searches, with “clients” charged between $2,000 and $15,000 to gain new military registration documents, excluding them from service.

The Kyiv TCC and Kyiv police did not respond to The i Paper’s requests for comment.

Yurii Honcharenko, head of Ukrainian research and analysis group InfoLight.UA, says that this news has taken a toll on citizens in the war-torn country. “Every day there are examples of corruption,” he added.

Russian-backed groups are exploiting the growing discontent felt by Ukrainians around the actions of some TCC personnel, with InfoLight.UA warning since August last year about the threat of Russian disinformation around conscription.

“There were emerging groups against mobilisation that were inciting people to rebel… These communities were Russian networks spreading conspiracy theories,” said Honcharenko.

Colonel Taras Dziuba, chief of the communications department of the AFU Ground Forces Command, has said Russian actors were involved in psychological warfare that sought to demonise the TCC and create a “boogeyman”.

In an interview with Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform, Dziuba claimed that 75 per cent of Telegram channels with provocative videos about TCC had Russian or Belarusian registration.

This growing crisis has led to violent attacks against TCC personnel. During mobilisation activities on 9 December, a TCC inspector was assaulted with a pickaxe in the Lviv region.

Meanwhile, Russian strikes have targeted territorial recruitment centres across Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, to disrupt the process.

‘Massive rights violations’

Trunova asked Ms Sopina if she could tell the story of her son’s death on her TV channel, and her friend agreed, despite her concern of a backlash. “The next day, I wrote a post on Facebook and many people started leaving comments,” said Trunova. Mr Sopin’s case went viral.

In Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, Trunova asked Ihor Klymenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, for action to be taken over the alleged assault. “He replied that he would take the case under his control,” said Trunova.

Law enforcement officers and the military ombudsman told her they were working on the case, she said. But now Mr Sopin’s death is no longer top of the news agenda in Ukraine, she claims the investigation has come to a standstill.

“Unfortunately, despite the fact that there was a huge public outcry, and the minister personally promised that he would oversee this case, there are no suspects,” she added.

Klymenko did not respond to The i Paper’s request for comment.

In a joint statement, the Podil Territorial Recruitment Centre and the 71st Jaeger Brigade denied assaulting Sopin and maintain he “lost consciousness, fell and hit his head on the hard floor… this happened in front of many witnesses”.

Dmytro Lubinets, commissioner for human rights in Ukraine’s parliament, has consistently called attention to the dire state of forced mobilisations. “Based on the results of numerous appeals from citizens to the Ombudsman’s Office, I can clearly state: human rights violations by employees of the TCC… have become systemic and massive,” Lubinets said in a statement earlier this year.

Serious issues with conscription in Ukraine are not new. Following an inspection of TCCs, on 11 August 2023, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree to dismiss the heads of all regional military recruitment offices.

Lubinets’ team told The i Paper that there had been a significant increase in the number of complaints this year, and staff were thoroughly examining cases of alleged violations.

Data provided by the ombudsman to The i Paper showed 18 complaints were received in 2022 relating to the violations of citizens’ rights during conscription for military service by TCC officials. In 2023, the number reached more than 500, and in 2024, more than 3,400 complaints were made.

So far this year, almost 5,000 appeals have been received.

Murder accusations

Protas, the Sopin family’s lawyer, believes the TCC is trying to cover up the case.

“The official version from the TCC doesn’t have any common sense,” he said. “They explained it by [Sopin] having an illness of some kind. But after it was revealed that he didn’t have any kind of illness that could lead to the injuries he received, they said that he simply lost consciousness and fell on the ground.”

Protas says this is not unusual. Just a day before Sopin’s incident, the lawyer received a call from the father of an injured man being held in a TCC. Despite the medical emergency, Protas claims it was not possible to call an ambulance to the TCC for three hours. “The TCC used all of its power to prevent the ambulance from helping him,” he alleges.

Protas has images he shares of a dead conscript, with visible bruise marks, who was allegedly beaten by TCC officers. “The TCC said he had a heart disease,” Protas said.

Lawyers, too, have been targeted by the TCC when trying to represent clients, according to a report published by the Ukrainian National Bar Association. In some cases, advocates were injured and citizens detained for long periods in TCC premises, the report claimed.

“Even though they’re afraid for their lives, people just can’t keep their mouths shut any more, because after all the things that the TCC has done illegally, people want justice. With time, there will be more and more people who will be going against this whole system. Ukrainians value justice very highly,” said Protas.

Russian propaganda

Even Trunova, a journalist who is no stranger to discussing sensitive topics, is hesitant to speak out about allegations of abuse by the TCC to media outside Ukraine.

“I’m no friend of the Kremlin,” she asserts. “I’m here in Kyiv with my child. My husband is in the army. I only want all people in Ukraine, especially in the army, to have human rights and for our structures to protect our people.”

Trunova said she has been targeted by Russian state TV host Olga Skabeyeva, who took a fragment of an interview she conducted with a TCC representative and accused Trunova of supporting the mobilisation that led to Sopin’s death.

“It was a very hard period. People said to me that I’m guilty of his death,” said Trunova.

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Skabeyeva has been sanctioned by the European Union, UK and US for spreading pro-Russian propaganda.

Ms Sopina, like other Ukrainians, wants a future where the country succeeds in its struggle against Russia. She hopes that the death of her son during mobilisation will be one of the last.

“We know who the enemy is – it’s not the people of our country,” she says, exasperated. “Why do you kill our people? If he is killed by the enemy in the war, I will understand this, but now I cannot understand anything. It’s unreal.”

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