What the Lviv draft riot tells us about Ukraine’s struggle to send men to fight

A draft riot broke out in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv last week. On Wednesday evening, territorial recruitment officers – the official name for the military personnel charged with conscripting military-age men – stopped a man in the street they apparently suspected of evading the country’s mandatory military service.

After checking his registration documents, they held him at a local draft centre to undergo a medical exam that would determine whether he was fit to be sent to the front.

Eyewitnesses reported that other draft officers remained on the scene, and soon tried to detain two more men. By this point, prosecutors say, a crowd of some 200 people had gathered.

They surrounded the officers and tried to physically stop them from taking the men away. One video, which recruitment authorities insist has been taken out of context, showed an officer striking a member of the public.

Footage published across social media shows hundreds of people heaving around the officers’ army vehicle, rocking it back and forth to chants of “Shame!”

Before long, they had tipped the battered car over, to widespread cheers. They stripped the clothes off one of the officers’ backs. A police officer who tried to intervene was also injured.

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While more dramatic than most outbursts, it is far from the first time that Ukraine’s draft officers have found themselves face-to-face with a seething public.

'Abusive practices'

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine slouches deeper into its fifth year, the number of violent confrontations with draft officers – themselves often soldiers who were wounded on the front line – continues to rise sharply.

In 2022, in the first year of the Russian invasion, police reported just five cases of people attacking draft officers. By last year, that number had risen to 341, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

Just shy of 120 such clashes took place in the first four months of 2026 alone – including the fatal stabbing of a draft officer in April. The suspect alleged that a group of draft officers had beaten him and his brother and sprayed them with pepper spray.

While the more prosperous and populous Russia has so far managed to tempt raw recruits to the front in part through generous financial incentives, the number of Ukrainians signing up to push back the Russia's advance has fallen dramatically following Kyiv’s last major counteroffensive in the spring of 2023.

Instead, Ukraine has become increasingly reliant on conscripted troops to replace those killed or wounded on the front line.

While both Kyiv and Moscow remain tight-lipped about their own casualty rates, the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies think-tank this month estimated that as many as 635,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed, wounded or gone missing since February 2022 – less than half the estimated 1.4 million casualties suffered by Russian forces.

Under Ukraine’s current mobilisation laws, men between the ages of 25 and 60 are subject to mandatory military service. As an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described in March, it is a policy that enjoys little public trust.

“Highly visible cases of abusive practices, legal overreach, and selective enforcement of mobilisation have undermined Ukrainians’ perception of the process’s legitimacy, increased public anxiety, and provided fertile ground for Russian information operations,” it read.

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'A real lack of manpower'

While accusations that wealthy or well-connected Ukrainians have been able to buy their way out of military service have dogged the programme from the beginning, much of the public unease centres on a tactic that has become known as “busification”, where draft officers effectively press-gang military-age men on the street and bus them to recruitment centres for a perfunctory medical exam and enlistment. As you would expect, videos of these incidents spread swiftly across social media, gleefully picked up and promoted by Russian media.

Draft officers have been accused of beating the men they detain, and several deaths have been recorded – including that of 43-year-old Roman Sopin last year, who died from a severe head injury in a recruitment centre. Authorities said that Sopin fell, which his family and lawyer deny.

While authorities maintain that the overwhelming majority of mobilisation cases pass without incident, the number of complaints about draft officers to Ukraine’s Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights has risen steeply since the war began. In 2022, just 18 complaints were recorded. Last year, there were 6,127. Some 1,657 complaints about draft officers’ behaviour were registered in the first four months of 2026.

Ryhor Nizhnikau, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs’ Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia programme, said that the urgent need for troops to hold back Moscow’s grinding advance had put enormous pressure on the mobilisation effort.

“It’s quite banal, but there is a real lack of manpower, which makes the state more aggressive and more assertive in trying to find people,” he said. “Which was obviously not the case two or three years ago, when so much of the mobilisation was based on volunteers.”

Nizhnikau added that lingering uncertainty around the programme had also eroded public trust.

“This need is aggravated by the fact that Ukraine has no clear mobilisation strategy or policy,” he said. “It's not just the question of 2022, it started in 2014 – the state just didn't create the mechanisms and didn't communicate them clearly to society. Who is recruited, who is [exempt] from mobilisation, by what professions, how is this done, how people in the army get demobilised – people are very upset, and this unclarity feeds a sense of injustice.”

Sweeping reforms

In January, Ukraine’s newly appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced that an estimated two million Ukrainians were evading the draft. For the first time, he put an official figure on the number of troops believed to have abandoned their posts without leave – some 200,000 people. More than four-fifths of desertions are believed to take place during basic training.

It is not a situation that Kyiv can safely ignore. In June, Fedorov announced the outlines of a sweeping reform to the country’s military service. Alongside dramatic pay rises for frontline troops, the reform will introduce fixed-term contracts for troops ranging from six to 14 months.

The defence ministry also hinted that some of the country’s longest-serving troops could be demobilised by the end of the year – including those who have been fighting Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas since 2014. Under the current system, troops remain mobilised indefinitely, with martial law severely narrowing the circumstances under which soldiers can be discharged from duty.

Fedorov also announced that Kyiv would be stepping up its recruitment of foreign fighters. Foreign volunteers, particularly from Latin America, have already begun to fill the Ukrainian army's ranks.

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Under this fresh recruitment drive, he said, foreign nationals would eventually comprise up to half of the country’s high-risk infantry and assault troops.

“This reform that the Ministry of Defence is promoting is being done simply because the situation became so tense that you can no longer close your eyes,” Nizhnikau said. “It affects the army, and it affects civilians, and both of them are unhappy with the situation.”

That unhappiness has at times taken on a bitter edge. Late last week, several of the people who had taken part in the Lviv clashes – including teenagers – appeared on camera apologising to soldiers for their actions. One man, who described himself as being absent without leave, pledged to return to the front. Another promised to enlist to fight.

The videos were posted by military Telegram accounts, including that of Dmytryo Kukharchuk, a deputy commander in the 3rd Army Corps and one of the leaders of the far-right National Corps party. Kukharchuk said he and his fellow troops had held “educational conversations” with the rioters to prompt their apologies.

“There’s a huge conflict between different social groups, because one of the key issues … is that people who are now in the army see that there are no lines of people who want to serve, and mobilisation is done by force. So, they see it as, ‘okay, I might be demobilised in two years, but they don't recruit people who will come in,’” Nizhnikau said.

“And civilians don't want to mobilise for a plethora of reasons – so there is also a very clear civic-military divide.”