Context: On June 1, 2026, RBC-Ukraine reported that Ukraine was preparing to reform its military. The publication states that the authorities are considering disbanding the Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support. The cited reason is the numerous complaints about the methods that TCR staff used to identify draft dodgers.
On the June 3, 2026 edition of ONT’s program ObyektivNo, participants discussed what host Dzmitry Bachkou called a “logical question” — with what forces does Ukraine plan to wage the war, given that, in his words, “Ukrainians themselves are not eager to do so.” Writer and historian Viachaslau Bandarenka drew a comparison between the forced mobilization in Ukraine and the mobilization in the USSR during World War II, stating that no one evaded the draft back then.
“In a country that is waging a sacred defensive war, such scenes are simply impossible. We cannot imagine something like that, for example, in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War: people being forcibly dragged into the Red Army while they desperately resist. On the contrary, recruitment offices were besieged by crowds of volunteers,” said Bandarenka.
Following the attack by Nazi Germany on the USSR, many Soviet citizens indeed chose to enlist in the Red Army voluntarily. This is evidenced by numerous applications preserved in the archives. The same thing happened in Ukraine after the full-scale war began: Ukrainians lined up outside military recruitment offices.
However, the presence of volunteers does not mean there were no draft evaders. Soviet archival documents confirm this. The Weekly Top Fake team discovered an NKVD report detailing the number of deserters and draft dodgers in September 1944. The document is stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation.
The report states that desertion peaked during the first year of the war, with more than 700,000 people detained at that time. In the years that followed, this figure declined. The number of draft dodgers, on the other hand, was growing. Approximately 70,000 Soviet citizens evaded the draft in 1941. Their number had reached nearly 500,000 by September 1944. Another 1.2 million people deserted. Thus, approximately 1.5% of those mobilized to the front avoided participating in the war, while over 3% deserted.
Viachaslau Bandarenka described the evasion of mobilization as a unique Ukrainian phenomenon. However, archival documents reveal that hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens evaded service in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War.