Civil war dispatches
Mobilization killings, corruption, reactions. 10 more years.
Ukraine has enough mobilization reserves to keep fighting for another 10 years, and even longer.
Such were the April 6 words of Oleksandr Merezhko, an MP from Zelensky’s fraction. He soon explained himself in more detail:
There are about 1.5 or 2 million draft dodgers... At the front, I think there are about 100 or 200 thousand people fighting. If you take this figure of 2 million and divide it by 100 or 200 thousand, you see that this mobilization resource allows one to wage war for at least 10 years. That's what is meant. Such is the calculation.
Merezhko can keep calculating. On the streets, something many call a civil war is boiling away. We’ll take a look at the latest killings, then examine the diverse reactions among Ukrainian nazis and nationalist liberals.
Some of the nazis call mobilization a Jewish plot to destroy the Ukrainian nation, while others call to destroy opponents of the draft. Among the patriotic liberals, some are despondent about the ever-intensifying civil war, even calling for modus vivendi with Russia to avoid total state disintegration. Most liberals, of course, call for the mobilization officers to be given more lethal powers in dealing with the proletarian rabble.
Finally, we’ll take a detailed look at the cost of various ‘solutions’, if one gets abducted by a mobilization minivan. It turns out that the sector generates up to $2 billion euros a year in bribes. Perhaps the government should start taxing it to fund its war effort.
Three stabbings in 4 days
A man’s throat was slashed in the western city of Lviv on April 2. The 37 year old victim Oleg Avdeev, who died of his wounds shortly after, was an officer of the Territorial Recruitment Centres (TRC).
His premature death meant that Avdeev and his colleagues from the TRC didn’t manage to drag anyone into their minibus, which was abandoned at the scene.
Avdeev’s killer was a 34 year-old Lvivite, Andriy Trush. According to the TRC, the police, and their friends in the western press such as DW:
the citizen refused to identify himself, did not present his documents, behaved defiantly and provocatively, and did not respond to the lawful demands of law enforcement officers
Though Trush fled, he was caught within a few hours, along with his knife collection.
Trush gave a different story of events in court a few days later.
He says he was walking with his younger brother, mother, and uncle to register their grandmother’s death certificate when TRC representatives attacked his brother, and then Trush himself, twisting both of their arms, and spraying them with pepper spray. This latter weapon is a beloved tool for the TRC, and one can see daily videos of them liberally utilizing it. Trush doesn’t remember stabbing the officer, only driving home after.
After that, the customs officer added, he only remembers driving home in a car.
Local journalist Vitaliy Glagola gave a similar account the day of the killing. He says that Avdeev used his knife to stop the TRC while his brother ran away.
This is far from the first such killing in Lviv, supposedly the heartland of the ultra-patriots. On December 4, 2025, 37 year-old TRC officers Yury Bondarenko was stabbed to death by 30 year-old Lviv resident Hryhoriy Kedruk. He told the court that after giving the TRC all his documents, four of them beat him, while the police did nothing. The TRC responded by condemning Ukrainians alienated by their practices:
This tragedy demonstrates a deeper trend that is gradually taking on dangerous signs: some Ukrainians are beginning to perceive the military as an outside force that supposedly threatens their everyday life, rather than as defenders who ensure that this life can continue
Indeed. You may also recall a video of these same defenders pumping flammable gas into a locked car and then setting it alight in order to force the man hiding inside to leave. On April 8, an internal military investigation came to the conclusion that the TRC did not exceed its powers in this 2024 incident.
On April 8, Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets paid a visit to TRC locations in the west Ukrainian town of Uzhgorod.
Despite obstruction by officials, we were able to document egregious violations. People were held here for weeks – detentions of 21, 24, 30, and even 50 days were recorded!
One person Lubinets found there was a combat veteran who had fought in Bakhmut, and even had documents to prove it. As usual, documents matter little to the TRC, as opposed to greenbacks.
A man with fused fingers was also detained there, clearly itching to head to the frontlines.
Other serious health issues were also observed.
By the way, military ombudsman Olga Reshetilova reported on the 5th of April that 2,000 men were found medically unfit for duty in a single military unit. She blamed the notoriously ‘lax’, so to speak, medical checks at the TRC.
Lubinets reported that people’s phones were confiscated during their stay at the TRC facilities. There were 30 to 40 men to a room, with three cups and eight metal plates for the lot. Cleaning utensils is not an option, so people have to take turns eating from the same plate.
The TRC featured only one toilet and shower, and there was no bed linen. Those with health problems do not receive the privilege of an ambulance.
Only after my representative's intervention was an ambulance called for a man with a blood pressure of 190 over 100, who had been pleading for help for several days. He was hospitalized with life-threatening conditions. After this, it's not surprising that we are receiving reports of sudden deaths at the TRC premises
Said premises appear to be an old gym:
As usual, an inspection was announced soon after. The TRC loves proclaiming its dedication to peaceful measures, with one top representative promising parliament in late March that there would be no more forced mobilization on the streets. In mid-March, there were also claims by MPs in Zelensky’s parliamentary fraction that the new, tech startuper minister of defense will replace street mobilization with ‘digital mobilization’, whatever that means.
But thankfully, at least some top Ukrainian officials are honest. Head of the presidential administration Kyryllo Budanov stated on the 3rd that there’s no need to expect any substantive changes from recent talk of a reform of the TRC system. As long as the war continues, he said, “the army needs human capital," and "if people don't join, they will have to be mobilized”. Human capital indeed.
Military ombudsman Olga Reshetilova struck the same tone on April 6, promising that coming changes to the mobilization system won’t be pleasant:
“‘Draft dodgers’ who have been evading service for years will NOT like the mobilization decision. But it’s unavoidable.”
It’s most likely all this will mean is higher tempos of forced mobilization. Others say the grand changes planned concern the name TRC. Due to its toxicity, said MP Roman Kostenko on April 8, the government is thinking of renaming it to the ‘Office of the Draft’, which in Ukrainian reads ‘OP’. The police may also be given more mobilization powers.
I’ll note here that one of Zelensky’s big early moves as president was to rename the ‘Administration of the President’ (AP) into the ‘Office of the President’, often referred to simply as ‘OP’. He proclaimed that the Office would move away from the long tradition of murky backroom deals in the AP by despised, unelected gray cardinals. Instead, Zelensky’s new head of the OP, Andriy Yermak, became Ukraine’s greatest and most hated such gray cardinal ever. Anyway, clearly Zelensky still loves calling things offices. It’s so tech, so reformist, so young. It’s also how scam call centers are called by their employers — ‘offices’. A sector with tight links to Zelensky’s Office of the President, by the way.
There have also been some entertaining memes comparing the TRC to the proposed Office of the Draft.
Take a look at the top comment on the above meme (automatically translated):
Speaking of black balaclavas.
The TRC or OP or whatever it’s called now claimed another victim, this time in Dnipro (or Dnipropetrovsk, or Dnepropetrovsk, or whatever you want to call it). The western-funded suspilne reported on April 2 about an incident from March 25, where a man called Sergey was attacked by TRC officers in balaclavas. Calling his wife, Sergey complained of a serious headache and couldn’t talk straight, saying he was being taken to do one of the infamous TRC health commissions. The connection was then lost.
His loyal wife Valentina found him by geolocating his phone. He was in a hospital. By this time, he could barely speak, simply repeating ‘my head hurts, my head hurts’. Then he started vomiting blood.
I looked at him and saw his right eyeball. It was just bulging forward, and his temple—there was a hollow in it
He soon entered a coma. Doctors identified severe brain injuries and performed a surgery. Witnesses confirmed that he’d been pushed into a mobilization minibus by men in balaclavas.
Luckily, the local TRC soon cleared things up. Pushing back against Valentina’s claims that Sergey’s documents were in order and that he was not draftable, they stated that the silly Sergey had been injured ‘due to his own carelessness while trying to escape.’ This is what Olena Kuzina, spokesperson for the regional TRC had to say:
Because it was dark outside, he tripped and fell. The alert team found him sitting on the wet pavement. They called an ambulance, which took him to a medical facility,
This is Sergey after ‘tripping’.
On March 17, a man in the same city died in hospital, two weeks after being captured by the TRC and beaten. There have been many such cases in Dnipro alone.
On April 4, there was another stabbing, this time in the southwestern city of Vynnytsia. This is what the regional TRC had to say about the incident:
According to preliminary information, today, during mobilization activities, military personnel from one of the TRcs, in cooperation with law enforcement, stopped a citizen. The servicemen identified themselves and attempted to check the citizen's documents, who then suddenly pulled out a knife and stabbed two servicemen several times. After further investigation, it was discovered that this citizen had been in violation of military registration since 2025
One was hospitalized with severe injuries, the other was relatively fine. The attacker was captured. The incident apparently took place near a market, with the TRC stopping a man riding a bicycle to check his documents.
And on April 6, the third stabbing in 4 days, this time in the northeastern city of Kharkov. While checking a man’s documents, one TRC officer was stabbed in the stomach. The attacker fled the scene.
The TRC knows how hated they are. On March 23, MP Oleksandr Fedienko shared his impressions of a group of TRC and police officers who’d set up a checkpoint near Kyiv. They were looking for armed deserters:
I happened to come across this event by chance. It wasn’t a checkpoint—there was only a sign requiring vehicles to stop before passing. The police were stopping cars, while TRC representatives stood off to the side. The TRC staff didn’t speak with me on camera—only the police did. Everything as usual: balaclavas…
The paradox is that one of the men in a balaclava had no identifying insignia at all, not in a regulation uniform, but wearing a body camera. As he said, he had forgotten his uniform at home and put on whatever he had. Another one had officer’s shoulder boards, but no body camera. One serviceman in a balaclava had been to the front, was discharged for health reasons, and then came to work at the TRC. He honestly admitted to me that he fears for the life and safety of his relatives, which is why he is forced to wear a balaclava so he won’t be recognized,
Nazi split
It's interesting noting that some of the most popular Ukrainian neo-nazi bloggers have split on the question of mobilization.
