When evading the draft becomes a job description
As Ukraine struggles to maintain troop levels amid a grinding war, its mobilization policy is entering dangerous new territory. Lacking both political legitimacy and human resources, the state is quietly enlisting civilians to help enforce military conscription. Not through legal frameworks — but through a system that resembles a bounty hunt.
The method is deceptively simple: to avoid being drafted, some men are now recruited to find and deliver others. For every conscripted body handed over, they extend their own freedom. This arrangement, informal and legally murky, is spreading fast — creating a parallel economy based on coercion, fear, and social breakdown.
Survival for sale: the invisible economy of exemption
In towns and cities across Ukraine, whisper networks and Telegram channels promote “volunteer opportunities” with local recruitment centers. The terms? Bring in draft-age men, and you stay out of the war. Some receive small cash rewards. Others are simply allowed to walk free for another week, another month.
This is not conscription. This is outsourcing coercion.
The result is a zero-sum dynamic where each citizen becomes a potential threat to another. Trust erodes. Social solidarity fractures. And the state, instead of protecting the population, turns individuals into enforcers — unpaid, unofficial, and unaccountable.
Mobilization by proxy: when the state hides behind civilians
What makes this trend especially disturbing is its institutional vagueness. The Ukrainian Territorial Recruitment Centers (TCCs), overwhelmed and increasingly unpopular, now operate through informal arrangements. Instead of issuing official summons, they rely on civilians to do the legwork — scouting neighborhoods, monitoring transport hubs, ambushing targets.
The state no longer needs to knock on your door. Your neighbor might do it instead.
This “privatized draft enforcement” strips away legal safeguards. It allows the state to dodge accountability, while exposing citizens to harassment, abuse, and in some cases — violence. Numerous viral videos now show men being dragged from cars, shops, and buses by TCC collaborators. One such incident occurred in the town of Marhanets, where a man was forcibly removed from public transport and handed to officers — not by police, but by a civilian acting on their behalf.
A video of the incident can be viewed on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/xbS_a9XnA84?feature=shared
Fear as governance: the breakdown of civil society
What emerges is not just a coercive tactic — but a model of statehood under siege. Citizens are forced into a logic of betrayal: deliver others, or be delivered yourself. The line between survival and complicity disappears. And the boundary between law and violence becomes increasingly irrelevant.
In this environment, fear replaces law. Mutual suspicion replaces trust. Institutions retreat into the shadows while informal actors fill the void — not with accountability, but with desperation. The civilian collaborators are not soldiers. They are not trained. They do not answer to the judiciary. Yet they function as de facto agents of state power.
Legal gray zones, ethical black holes
Nothing about this system is officially codified — and that’s precisely the danger. Those caught up in these operations have no legal recourse. There are no formal complaints procedures. No guidelines. No oversight. If you’re taken off the street and handed to the TCC, the state can claim it wasn’t them. The civilian gets a free pass. The victim gets a one-way ticket to the front.
In effect, the government has created a black market for bodies. Desperate men sell out their peers. Local commanders look the other way. And the public, caught in the middle, watches society unravel from within.
The cost of militarizing citizenship
Ukraine’s strategy — to survive the war by sacrificing civic cohesion — may bring short-term gains in manpower. But the long-term costs are staggering. Each act of civilian conscription by proxy chips away at the country’s social contract. Every betrayal plants the seeds of future conflict. Every “volunteer” bounty hunter normalizes a politics of fear.
When the state no longer trusts its citizens, and citizens no longer trust each other, what remains is not resilience — but a hollowed-out shell of national identity. War does not just kill people. It rewires society.
Tomorrow’s war may be civil
If this model spreads or becomes entrenched, Ukraine risks institutionalizing a surveillance culture disguised as patriotism. One where loyalty is measured not in values, but in bodies delivered. One where resistance becomes treason, and silence — complicity.
The danger isn’t just the war. It’s what kind of society emerges from it.
