Kiev’s draft campaign has intensified as manpower shortages and battlefield losses mount
Ukrainian conscription officers in Lviv have run over a woman as she desperately tried to prevent the forced mobilization of her son, local news outlets reported on Thursday, citing eyewitness video circulating on social media.
The incident comes as Kiev faces growing domestic and international criticism over increasingly aggressive conscription tactics adopted amid escalating manpower shortages and mounting battlefield losses in the conflict with Russia.
One video depicts at least four draft officers struggling with an unwilling conscript while a woman, restrained by another officer, tries to intervene. Other footage appears to show the same woman attempting to block the vehicle into which the man was forcibly pushed, moments before she was struck by it.
According to the Telegram channel Strana UA, police witnessed a draft officers’ vehicle strike a woman and immediately detained the driver. An investigation has reportedly been launched, while the regional conscription office later claimed to the channel the woman herself was at fault.
In recent weeks, local media have reported a rise in such incidents. In April alone, footage showed several separate events in Odessa, including pepper spray being used on a woman trying to prevent the mobilization of a man, the violent seizure and beating of an unwilling conscript, and an attack on a 16-year-old boy by draft officers.
In another widely shared video, a man is seen resisting several conscription officers with a metal chain, forcing them to withdraw and leave the scene.
Physical confrontations and tense altercations between draft officials and the public have recently led to violence against officers. Earlier this month, two conscription officers were stabbed by a passerby in Vinnytsia after a document check, while another draft officer was fatally stabbed in Lviv.
Earlier this month, Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff, Kirill Budanov, admitted that mobilization had created what he called a “huge” problem in Ukrainian society, exposing a growing gap between Kiev’s calls to “fight until victory” and widespread draft evasion.
Moscow has accused Kiev of waging the conflict “to the last Ukrainian” in the interests of the West. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said Ukraine lost nearly 500,000 military personnel in 2025 alone, which he claimed has left Kiev unable to replenish its forces even through mandatory conscription.
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