In Ukraine, What Happens to Civilian Rights When Mobilisation Has No Clear Limits?

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s mobilisation system has become one of the war’s most contested domestic measures. What began as an emergency response to an existential threat has hardened into a regime of indefinite service, opaque enforcement and shrinking civilian space. The Ukrainian state insists it has no choice, while others argue that human rights violations have become systematic.

Under international human rights law, including UN and EU frameworks, Ukraine has formally committed to the principle that conscription during wartime should be proportionate, non-arbitrary and bounded. Yet Ukraine's mobilisation system increasingly risks falling short of these standards. Experts highlight structural flaws, including corruption, unclear endpoints for service, and the absence of guaranteed rotations. Men are mobilised not for defined terms, but 'until the end of the war,' a phrase that for many has lost all temporal meaning.

Freedom of movement is curtailed not only by closed borders but by internal checkpoints that fracture cities into zones of risk. Meanwhile, recruitment officers and check teams operate in public spaces, contributing to a climate in which routine movement — commuting, waiting for a tram or navigating medical bureaucracy — can feel fraught for men of conscription age.

Digital tools like Reserve+ and Obereg, introduced as administrative fixes, now function as surveillance infrastructure for tracking movements, logging compliance, and building electronic dossiers. Officials frame them as anti-desertion measures. To many civilians, they resemble a permanent monitoring system with no oversight of civilians.

'I don’t think I would be useful with a weapon,' Andrii said. 'I know my limits. I can drive supplies, organise, fundraise, fix things, do paperwork –  all of that keeps people alive too. But fighting isn’t something you improvise because the state tells you to.' 

'If I’m forced into it, I won't become a soldier. I’ll become a liability.'

BETWEEN CIVILIAN AND COMBATANT

The right to remain a civilian still exists on paper, while in practice, it is fragile. Human rights groups have documented forced enlistments without proper medical assessments, men detained for days in recruitment centres, denied food or medical care, beaten during 'processing.' Some are mobilised directly from the street, having no chance of saying goodbye to their loved ones.

Corruption compounds the problem. Well-connected Ukrainians obtain exemptions through paid diagnoses, for example. Those without money or networks – rural men, internally displaced people, factory workers – are disproportionately targeted. The result is a system that often feels punitive rather than collective.

In occupied territories, Russia’s forced conscription of Ukrainian civilians constitutes a war crime. Russia has already shown it does not respect the distinction between civilians and combatants, through direct attacks on civilian infrastructure and the general population. Yet this reality does not absolve Kyiv of its own obligations. On the contrary, it sharpens the ethical stakes: the line separating civilian and combatant, already under strain, risks collapsing entirely.

Alongside formal enforcement, a subtler mechanism has emerged: social policing. Public discourse increasingly casts non-serving men as morally suspect. To stay home is to invite suspicion; to question mobilisation is to risk being labelled disloyal. This moral pressure functions as soft coercion, pushing compliance without due process.

Social media accelerates the dynamic. Videos of recruitment raids go viral, often accompanied by denunciations of 'cowards.' At the same time, Russian disinformation campaigns amplify these images to inflame resentment and fracture trust. The result is a feedback loop: real abuses fuel outrage, outrage feeds propaganda, and propaganda justifies further repression.

Ukrainian Ground Forces stated that negative mobilisation depictions, like videos of draft officer conflicts, are often exaggerated or Russian disinformation. However, it is important to acknowledge that real abuses do take place and these pose a structural concern. In response to reported abuse, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have in the past transferred more than 450 draft officers to other positions.   

Volunteers initially formed the army's backbone post-2022 through voluntary enlistments, but from 2023 onwards, recruitments have been increasingly difficult. In 2024, the Ukrainian Government addressed this issue through a controversial mobilisation law, which did not resolve the manpower shortage thus far. A report by the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) identifies social mobilisation fatigue, institutional deficits and a loss of trust due to corruption –  exacerbated by Russian disinformation – as key challenges to Ukrainian mobilisation.  

By 2025, this tension had begun to erode social cohesion. Economic hardship, exhaustion and unequal recruitment intensified resentment. Commanders and veterans publicly condemned evasion, warning that refusal to serve would invite Russian occupation and harsher forced service. What this rhetoric often ignores is fatigue. Between January 2022 and September 2025, Ukrainian law enforcement opened ‘almost 290,000 criminal cases of unauthorised abandonment of a military unit (AWOL) and desertion’. 

MOSTLY MUTED PROTESTS

The government’s response has been tactical rather than structural: amnesty for first-time deserters, harsher penalties for repeat evasion, and tighter digital controls. These measures manage symptoms without addressing causes. Western allies, meanwhile, continue to press for manpower increases, framing mobilisation as a technical problem of numbers rather than a social problem of legitimacy.

Small protests in Lviv reflect this tension. Participants have challenged unlawful detentions and procedural violations rather than mobilisation itself. 'We don’t protest the war efforts,' Dasha Nikits, a protester whose husband was forcefully recruited, said. 'We’re against being taken from the street, questioned without papers, or sent off without proper medical checks.'

Martial law restricts assembly, and the war’s moral gravity suppresses dissent. Many fear that the protest itself aids Russia’s narrative. Others fear the consequences: arrests, fines, criminal charges. Resistance takes quieter forms – ignored summonses, data non-compliance, flight. 

By 2024–25, Ukraine faced a significant mobilisation register and manpower gap. Although the Defence Ministry reported that about 4.7 million military‑aged men updated their mobilisation data by mid‑2024, a large portion of eligible men had not complied, contributing to an administrative shortfall in the enlistment system. 

At the same time, demographic data shows that around 650,000 eligible Ukrainian men left the country after Russia’s full‑scale invasion, and by early 2026, officials said roughly 2 million citizens were wanted for draft evasion.

TURNING CONTRIBUTION INTO COMPLIANCE

Beneath these dynamics lies a deeper fracture: many of those resisting mobilisation do not reject the war effort; they reject the state’s claim to monopolise the form their sacrifice must take. In a society already mobilised through volunteering, logistics, medical care, fundraising and documentation, forced conscription signals that only combat confers moral legitimacy.

This logic flattens moral agency. The distinction between choosing risk and being assigned erodes, turning contribution into compliance. For those already embedded in the war economy, mobilisation is experienced not as a shared burden but as dispossession – of role, of expertise, of autonomy.

For Andrii, these debates are abstract only until the knock comes. He scrolls through Telegram channels tracking recruitment raids, as Russian missiles have plunged Kyiv into power outages for most of the day, and temperatures are below zero. 'I want the war to end,' he says. 'I want Russia defeated. But I also want to know when my life is mine again.'