We republish the following article from the internationalist anarchists
of Assembly in Ukraine. ---- On August 28, the government decree ofAugust 26, 2025 No. 1031 came into force in Ukraine on permission to
travel abroad for men between the ages of 18-22. Previously, since the
beginning of the war on 24 February 2022, only men under 18 and over 60
were allowed to leave the country. At the border they need to present a
passport and a document with their latest military registration data in
paper or digital form. The majority of the remaining male population
aged 23-60 remains hostage to the state.
There are different versions of reasons for releasing some of the
hostages now: from the possibly approaching elections to, on the
contrary, the desire to get rid of pro-Western students, which have been
a central social base for mass anti-corruption protests a month ago, and
to prevent the holding of elections. A certain role was also played by
the fact that men under 25 are not subject to mobilization, so it is
much easier for them to approach the border with a backpack through
checkpoints and raids of territorial recruitment centers (TRCs).
Moreover, the political situation in the country, which appeared
stagnant for some time, has now entered a new, tumultous period. Perhaps
for the first time since 2019, there is a whiff of a thaw in the air,
against the backdrop of such a regular tightening the "tie of freedom"
on the people's neck.
The mass flow of people now fleeing the country bypassing border
checkpoints in the Romanian direction alone can be imagined from a
message in the Telegram group of the Ukrainian Freedom Movement about
this summer:
"There is a lot of food there, we found something 3-4 times in 7 days.
We had supplies for 3 days, then we ate what we found. And we got out.
The first time we found 12[packages of]freeze-dried foods. The second
time 3[more packages]. Then we found energy bars, 3 for two[people], and
coffee. Then we found more canisters and tiles, they leave them
everywhere. All kinds of medicines, vitamin C, painkillers, etc. Even a
power bank. Tents are pitched there in many places. The last time we
found food, I remember, a certain amount of puree. Plus a few[packages
of]freeze-dried foods and a bag of tea. Food is dropped both 20 km
before the border and right next to it."
Men who are older than 22 remain hostages of the state. Already on the
evening of September 1, in the Odessa region, border guards shot dead a
23-year-old refugee from Kharkov as he was trying to climb over the
fence into Moldova. The State Bureau of Investigation claimed in its
press release: "They[the refugees]did not respond to the lawful demands
of law enforcement to stop. During the pursuit, border guards fired
several warning shots at the violators. Later, the body of one of the
fugitives was discovered with a gunshot wound incompatible with life.
The border guards detained another man on the spot." The agency does not
explain how "warning" shots could have been fired at people. At present,
if we are to believe the SBI, the suspected border guard is taken into
custody and faces up to 10 years in prison.
But this death received far less press coverage than the murder in broad
daylight on August 30 of Andriy Parubiy in Lviv. Parubiy was a
co-organizer of both US-backed Maidan protest movements, in 2004 and
2014, the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament in 2016-2019 and a
quasi-oppositional MP since 2019. His political views can be fully
illustrated by the words from his father's funeral speech: "He was
intolerant of the Russian language from childhood. Different people
lived in our house. And Andriy, being a child, went out into the yard,
heard these people speak Russian, and didn't even start talking to them."
Less than two days after the murder, Mykhailo Stselnikov, an unemployed
man born in 1973, was detained in the Khmelnytsky region. His son, an IT
specialist, volunteered to fight and died in 2023 in the battle for
Bakhmut. From the words of his ex-wife, Stselnikov was against his son
joining the army - "one was a patriot and the other was not." The
detainee stated that the murder was his personal revenge against the
Ukrainian authorities and that he chose Parubiy as a target because he
lived nearby. "All I want is for you to pass sentence now. Yes, I knew
him, I killed him. And I want to ask to be exchanged for a prisoner of
war, so that I can go and find my son's body. That's all. I will not
give any more comments." It is unclear why the suspect hid after the
murder if he wanted to be detained. Moreover, in the video of the
shooting, the killer looks rather like an athletic young man, which is
why there is a version that Stselnikov is incriminating himself and the
murder was a signal from above so that the far-right public would not
even think about ceasing to serve as the regime's power base and
defecting to the former commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhnyi, who has
recently begun to make more and more political statements.
However, the main issue here is not whether the death of "one of the
founders of the modern Ukrainian state" (in the words of his fellow
party member Irina Gerashchenko) is connected with someone's decision to
erase the "browser history", and whether the suspect really murdered
Parubiy. The very fact that various political figures are now
assassinated with such regularity speaks of a crisis in the entire
governance and security system. Simply put, the ruling class cannot rule
in the old way.
This fact also emerges from the growing signs of social unrest from
below, especially the increasingly angry and violent resistance to the
forced mobilization drive. In Vinnytsya, an unsuccessful attempt at an
anti-mobilization took place on the evening of August 1. After that,
mass unrest began to subside again until on August 22, in the same city,
when patrol police detained a 25-year-old driver for violating traffic
rules. He was wanted as a draft dodger and tried to escape, but the cops
blocked his movement. A large crowd of passers-by tried to interfere
with administrative measures. There was no presence of TRC representatives.
On the evening of August 14, in Kharkov, a 36-year-old unemployed man
was stopped on the street by a policeman and three TRC employees. When
asked to show documents, he stabbed all four of them; two soldiers were
hospitalized, one of them in serious condition - doctors fought for his
life all night. The suspect was arrested a day later. The court remanded
him in custody without setting bail for two months.
On August 7, in the Volyn village of Solovychi, an angry crowd of
residents, including the village chairman, attacked enlistment agents
and the police. During the document check, a man tried to escape, and
another jumped on the hood of a TRC vehicle and smashed the windshield
with a stone. Then a woman started banging against the car. Another man
ran up with a wrench, smashed the side windows and hit the driver on the
hand three times. Then the minivan was blocked by other cars, including
trucks, about 10 people surrounded it and began to beat it.
In another village in this region, Novi Chervyshcha, according to a
local TV report from August 19, enlistment employees took away a
disabled man who was riding a bicycle. After that, elderly women began
throwing stones at their car. Then one of them got out of the car and
started shooting, wounding one of the pensioners. "Five or six times he
fired straight at me... And my neighbor was hit in the cheek. They took
her to the hospital," a woman told the local TV station. The visitors
drove the captured man out beyond the village and then threw him out of
the vehicle.
On September 4, in the village of Boratyn near Lutsk, during an attempt
to check the military registration documents of a group of four
passersby, two of them tried to escape and hide in an abandoned
building. They began to physically resist the enlistment patrolmen who
caught up with them. Then, one of the soldiers pulled out a traumatic
pistol - they knocked it out of his hands and started to shoot in the
direction of the pursuers themselves. Tear gas was used against the
civilians, one of the military reportedly suffered a broken arm. Those
who defended themselves were taken to the police and interrogated. This
is the official version from the Volyn Regional TRC. The workers
themselves told a different story in an interview: enlistment agents
came to their construction site, one of them started spraying the
builders with a pepper spray, and the other started shooting. After
that, a worker took the spray can and knocked the pistol away from the
TRC employee.
On September 9, after the TCR employees forcibly detained some man in
the city of Lutsk and put him in a van, people tried to free him. During
the incident, the windows of the car were broken and the tires slashed.
Local residents also blocked the gate of the residential complex,
preventing anyone from leaving. Several police and medical cars arrived
at the scene. The conflict eventually ended with the cops taking the
detainee to an ambulance.
On September 6, in the village of Bodnariv of the Ivano-Frankivsk
region, a crowd of about 50 locals blocked the road between
Ivano-Frankivsk and Kalush (the homeland of Stepan Bandera). The reason
was a protest against the mobilization of the village chairman Oleg
Drogomyretsky, who was taken from his home three days earlier. The
action was supported by the mayor of Kalush. He proposed creating a
collective appeal to the regional military administration.
The disunity of the working class due to mobilization and mass migration
help account for the fact that, instead of socio-economic strikes, so
far, in labor conflicts people also often prefer individual steps. For
example, on July 25, in the city of Dnieper a woman from Kharkov was
sentenced on charges of committing an act of double arson due to the
violation of her labor rights. Three months before, in the early hours
of April 13, she had gone to a massage parlor, for whose owner she had
previously worked as a telecom operator without registration. There, the
woman set fire to the beds. A few minutes later, she did the same in
another massage parlor. The premises burned down completely. "During the
trial, the accused, without disputing the circumstances of the crime she
committed, denied that her motive was hooliganism, pointing to the fact
that her actions were not without cause, but were, on the contrary,
caused by a conflict with the victim, which arose over the issue of
payment in informal labor relations. Fines were imposed on her, and the
victim treated her very disrespectfully, which caused her indignation
and desire for revenge." Since the arsonist had previously served a
sentence for theft, she was given a real 3 years in prison.
On July 2, a court in Kharkov convicted an employed and previously
unconvicted citizen for setting fire to the SOCAR gas station. According
to the sentence, on the evening of October 5, 2024, the man had gone to
the gas station to buy a wood lighter after a drunken walk. "In a fit of
bad mood and[given]the situation in the country," he took a bottle of
flammable liquid from the shelf, poured it over the cash register area
of the operator, lit a fire and hid. The cashier extinguished the fire
with a fire extinguisher. The man admitted his guilt, sincerely
repented, fully compensated for the damage caused. On the charge of
intentional destruction or damage to property, he received 4 years of
probation with a probationary period of 2 years.
While the border serfdom of the male population has now been slightly
alleviated, another side of the coin is the possible adoption of a
series of bills that, on the contrary, again tighten the noose: Bill No.
13673, which introduces criminal liability for illegally crossing the
state border during martial law; Bill No. 13634-1 on the deprivation of
deferment for students who began their studies after 25 years or who
exceeded the term of the academic program; and Bill No. 13452, which
toughens the punishment for military personnel for refusal to follow an
order of commander to 5-10 years in prison.
But what can they change? No one is surprised anymore by tens of
thousands of ordinary soldiers fleeing the army. Indeed, over the past
month, some signs have begun to appear that the erosion has reached the
very foundations of the regime. The story we reported earlier about a
Ukrainian company commander who deserted from the Kursk region and was
preparing to go to Romania turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg.
Roman Donik from the 151st Armed Forces Training Center complained on
August 28 that one of the instructors did not return from vacation in
Lithuania. This had never happened before. Sergei Lukashov, a company
commander from the 46th Airmobile Brigade who previously headed a local
police department in the Dnepropetrovsk region, posted on September 13:
"I receive information from my former police colleagues that young law
enforcement personnel under the age of 23 is resigning from the National
Police of Ukraine in dozens and going abroad." Shortly after the 5th
August murder a patrol officer by a driver during an attempt to check
documents in Izmail of the Odessa region, information appeared that
Maxim Standratyuk, another patrol inspector who had previously even
served as acting deputy chief of the patrol police in this town, fled to
Romania with his partner. On August 8, it became known that Maxim
Grimalyak, who was employed with the criminal division of the local
police, fled to Romania too: "Literally two weeks ago, he was working in
Kharkov, looking for draft dodgers, and now he's telling[others]how to
illegally cross the border..." On the evening of August 9, on the way to
the border in Transcarpathia, the deputy chief of the criminal
investigation department in the Kharkov Regional Police Directorate was
detained at a checkpoint. With him in the service car were a woman and
two men, one of whom was wanted by the TRC. The travelers were taken to
the enlistment office, the cop was fired from the police and drafted
into the army. His name and rank are not disclosed by the press service.
Finally, although not many people in Ukraine remember that radicalism
can be not only right-wing, this summer we learned about some agitation
in our city from the opposite flank. "I know and am looking for
ultra-leftists who are for an independent socialist republic of Ukraine
with genuine democracy and the abolition of private property (it sounds
scary, but if you read it, you will understand). Who believe that
fighting for Ukrainian or Russian oligarchs is pointless, as Marx, Lenin
or Kropotkin explained. Who are against everyone, as it should be," the
author of this leaflet wrote on June 21.
Whatever comes out of the peace talks this year, there can be little
doubt that Ukraine will keep the male population on the chain for as
long as possible. And a hypothetical truce with Russia could even
strengthen border control by sending fresh reinforcements from the
eastern to the western front. Moreover, there is no indication that even
if Ukraine opens an exit door for everyone, Russia will cancel its
mocking border filtering system. The European Union will also probably
take measures to limit migration flows from Ukraine in such a case -
neither it nor Russia needs new millions of refugees. So for us, in any
case, there will still be a lot of work for freedom of movement, the
implementation of which depends on financial support from our audience.
assembly.org.ua
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/09/19/good-night-ukrainian-pride-the-partial-victory-of-feet-voting-in-ukraine-what-is-behind-this/
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