conflict with Russia<\/a> has ground on, such clashes have become increasingly frequent. Videos of altercations between military-age men and officers from Ukraine\u2019s reviled territorial recruitment centres have become a fixture of social media. Their tactics have become known as \u201cbusification\u201d, after the minibuses used to take away recruits who have been forcibly conscripted.<\/p>\n\u2018I simply don\u2019t want to die\u2019<\/p>\n
For Roman and other men living in hiding, they are a spectre of absolute fear. He said: \u201cThink for a second about what my life looks like. I don\u2019t have a job. I can\u2019t go abroad. I can\u2019t see my friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he insists, his restricted existence does not compare to the horrors of serving on the front line: \u201cI simply don\u2019t want to die. It\u2019s the most basic human instinct.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a sentiment shared by an estimated two million draft dodgers across Ukraine, as well as hundreds of thousands of soldiers listed as \u201cabsent without leave\u201d after fleeing the front line.<\/p>\n
Heavy-handed tactics have become the norm during Ukraine\u2019s struggle to sustain its fighting force, making draft officers targets of public anger.<\/p>\n
Three are known to have been killed, and in April the national police said there had been 611 attacks since the start of the war. The number of violent incidents has climbed year on year, from five in 2022 to almost 120 in the first four months of this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Passers-by, mostly young men, were filmed climbing on top of a draft officer\u2019s car, battering it, then overturning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6281,158,7086,25,6,11,1324,26,35,81],"class_list":["post-22230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-foreign-projects","tag-kyiv","tag-protests","tag-russia","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-ukraine","tag-volodymyr-zelensky","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}