The incident reportedly took place in Odessa amid growing public outrage over how Kiev’s ‘busification’ officers snatch men off the streets
Ukrainian conscription officers reportedly sprayed civilians with tear gas in Odessa after they tried to stop a press gang from seizing a man for military service.
According to the Novosti Odessa Telegram channel, several people approached a vehicle carrying draft officers during an alleged attempt at ‘busification’ – a pejorative term denoting a practice whereby draft officers snatch military-age men in public and drag them into vans to take them to conscription centers, often using violence against those who resist.
A video posted online by the outlet shows several people trying to pull away a young man whom the press gang was presumably after, while pushing the draft officers back into their vehicle. The officers then appear to spray tear gas at the crowd before hastily driving off amid expletives and angry shouts of “get out of here.”
The outlet said the incident took place on Saturday evening in a busy residential neighborhood roughly midway between the city center and Odessa’s Black Sea port.
Kiev has increasingly relied on violently enforced conscription amid battlefield losses and Russian advances, with reports of ‘busification’ emerging almost daily.
The campaign has fueled tensions across Ukrainian society, with multiple reports of draft officers brawling with relatives and passersby trying to free would-be conscripts from press gang vans.
While officials insist mobilization is unavoidable in the conflict with Russia, many citizens see the system as rife with state-sanctioned corruption and as disproportionately targeting the poor.
Recruits and their families have also accused authorities of systematic abuse, ignoring exemptions and drafting men medically unfit for service. Meanwhile, military-age men have resorted to various means to avoid the draft, from fleeing the country illegally to setting military recruitment offices on fire or hiding in their homes for months.
Saturday’s incident is not the first reported case of draft officers using tear gas on civilians. Earlier this month, a video purportedly showed a press gang assaulting a young couple in a taxi and repeatedly spraying them with what appeared to be tear gas while trying to drag the man from the vehicle. In late June, a press gang reportedly used tear gas on a 12-year-old girl caught up in an attack on a vehicle carrying draft officers.
Some Ukrainian officials have grown increasingly critical of how the forced conscription is being carried out. Kiev’s human rights ombudsman, Dmitry Lubinets, recently blamed abuses on systemic Defense Ministry failures that had fostered a culture of impunity. In a Telegram post on Saturday, he cited the case of a Ukrainian scientist and archaeologist who was forcibly conscripted despite being entitled to a draft deferment, the documents for which were still being processed. Lubinets called the situation “outrageous,” saying that “blind busification” and mobilization “for the sake of a tick must be eradicated.”
Moscow has argued that growing public resistance to forced conscription shows that the Ukrainian government has lost its legitimacy and can only survive through increasingly authoritarian measures. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova recently described the situation as “absolute lawlessness.”
