Mobilization: death, escape, corruption

Another death at a mobilization office. US congressmen demand mobilization of the youth. 6 million dollars in cash found at corrupt doctor family's house - member of Zelensky's party

Back in 2021, I was on a train to the western border of Ukraine, travelling through the Carpathian mountains. Between enjoying the bucolic landscapes and occasional forlorn statues honoring various unsavory figures from the 1940s, I struck up conversation with a local in his 40s.

Local villagers clearly created this charming statue of ‘a Ukrainian Partisan fighter bidding farewell to his wife’. I noticed it while hiking in a small village in the Carpathians, and managed to find it on google maps. Of course, it became less enchanting when you find out what the UPA did in the 1940s

He spoke in a very heavily accented Ukrainian - there are many in the Carpathian region who even claim to form a separate ethnicity, and speak a separate language - Rusyn. This part of Ukraine first became part of a unified Ukrainian state in 1945, and Rusyn activists draw attention to their forced Ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine, which embraced a ‘proletarian Ukrainian patriotism’ to combat ‘bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism’. Anyway, historical segue over.

He told me his destination - the Czech Republic. There, he would work as a construction worker with other Ukrainians. ‘You have to, those in charge, Poroshenko, Zelensky, everyone, they’ve stolen everything there is’. He told me about the car factories in his Carpathian border city of Mukachevo - sweatshops working for Austrian companies. Eventually I got off at my stop for a mountain hike, and he continued on his way to the border.

On September 25, the pro-western publication Suspilne put out a story about the fate of a man quite similar to the one I chatted back in that train.

On September 4, 53 year-old Serhiy Kanalosh from the small Carpathian city of Svalyava died on his fourth day at the Mukachevo regional mobilization office (TSK).

Svalyava

According to the TSK, he fell ill during transportation and then had a fatal stroke in hospital. Serhiy’s widow, Olha Tanalosha, has a different story:

On August 28, he was taken to the military recruitment office. He went there uninjured and without bruises. I immediately went to see him. We were allowed to meet, but only through a fence. He was fine. I didn't see any injuries on August 30 or 31. He kept repeating that they were preparing documents to send him home. For three days I waited for us to go home, but it never happened

Olha told Suspilne that she noticed signs of beating on her husband’s third day at the TSK. Serhiy also told her he had been beaten during a brief meeting. Olha told Suspilne:

On Sunday, September 1, I went to see him and saw that he was badly beaten and limping, with a broken nose and a bruise under his right eye. He was taken away, and the same military officer who transported him explained to me that Serhiy was going to the police to file a report about who had beaten him. But things didn’t turn out that way...

The head doctor of the Svalyava City hospital confirmed that Serhiy was brought to the hospital unconscious and CT scans revealed intracranial hemorrhage.

Regional law enforcement claims it is looking into the matter. But there have been many such cases, especially in this desperately poor part of the country. And the TSK hardly feels threatened - it publicly sticks to its standard story in such cases, that they had nothing to do with Serhiy’s death. Olha also claims that her late husband was medically unfit for service - not that this has ever stopped the mobilization officers.

What struck me most from the video interviewing Olha was where she laid out her late husband’s remains in her modest dwelling - ‘all I have left to remember him’:

An adidas tracksuit and old black shoes - Serhiy was dressed like the man I met. Like the man I talked to, Olha speaks in a very ‘Carpathian’ Ukrainian - so much so that the patriotic Suspilne subtitles her speech with the ‘correct’ Ukrainian (though honestly, it is easily understandable).

Serhiy also looks like the man I met, with the face of a man worn down by years of hard work. This is what 53 years looks like in Ukraine.

Younger, younger!

On October 4, parliamentarian Roman Kostenko once again called on the government to begin mobilizing men aged 20 years and older. Kostenko, secretary of the parliamentary security and defense committee, stated the following in a TV interview:

“US congressmen call me all the time and say

"We give you weapons, and you say you don't have enough people. How is it that you don't conscript people under 25? How does that even work?"

"It's hard for me to answer, I don't know why,"