Military mobilization has been taking place in Ukraine for more than five hundred days, and the officers of the recruiting offices are often not selective in their brutal means.
According to the evidence of new footage appearing daily on social networking sites and Internet messaging channels, men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forcibly grabbed on the street, Origó wrote.
While the West and the president of the European Commission celebrate Ukrainian democracy, the majority of conscripted Ukrainian men directly compare these methods to North Korea or the Gulag. In addition, the street brutality took place even when Zelenskiy was trying to prove in Vilnius last week how ripe his country is for NATO membership. During this time, however, the Ukrainian Internet platforms were once again flooded with videos exposing the violence of the military auxiliaries, as well as the resulting memes.
Most of the new recordings were made in Odessa after the NATO summit.
In the million-strong city, the majority of which are Russian-speaking, military auxiliaries roam the public squares in herds and men walking alone, age-appropriate and fit for war, are abducted from the streets with noble simplicity.
The Odessa and Sumy military accessories are on sale
Thanks to the videos published in the past few days, Ukrainians can witness not only simple official kidnappings, but also brutal scenes. Men who want to avoid identification or protest against the procedure are often beaten before being put on the minibus.
All of this is happening after Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, appointed a new auxiliary chief to head the region in the person of Colonel Oleksandr Ohrimenko, who until now was the commander of the 14th mechanized brigade. The reason for the change was that it was revealed that Yevhenii Borisov, the former military auxiliary leader,
he is so corrupt that since the outbreak of the war, he has bought himself a villa on the Spanish coast for four million euros, but he even splurged on a luxury vehicle worth nearly 200,000 euros. According to many, he collected the money from those who wanted to avoid mobilization.
However, according to the evidence of the videos, the brutality did not decrease despite the change. In one of the recordings from Odessa, for example, several uniformed men force a man to the ground next to a yellow minibus, who is beaten before being put into the vehicle.
In another video, his own family members record a young man being arrested and then handcuffed by line officers.
Of course, similar shocking scenes are recorded not only by the citizens of Odessa. In the past few days, motorists in Sumy, northern Ukraine, recorded someone being forcibly packed into the trunk of a minibus by uniformed officers. But Transcarpathia was also overrun by recruiting officers: there are places where they go from house to house, often closing certain routes in search of conscripts.
Indignant passengers also record on their phones as soon as the authorities remove male passengers from the scheduled flights. The measure is legal only if the soldiers in the line together with the police get the passengers of the bus certified.
The flight cannot continue until all men on board have been identified. In the best case, they will receive a call-up order, with which they have to appear at the military auxiliary headquarters the next day, in the worst case, they will be taken away immediately.
Mobilization will certainly continue in Ukraine as long as martial law lasts. Rezident, a Telegram channel with close to one million followers that communicates Ukrainian opposition content, writes about the new wave of mobilization:
our presidential office source stated that Zelensky gave the order to intensify the mobilization and to increase the number of the Ukrainian army by another 200,000.
The presidential office, through the war council, will put pressure on Zaluzhny [Army Commander-in-Chief], who opposes the Azov operation and the second phase of the counteroffensive.
Featured image: MTI/AP/Libkos
