Valentyna Yurchenko: The Phenomenon of ‘Busification’ as a Threat to Human Rights in Ukraine
Busification is an informal but extremely common term that emerged in Ukrainian society during the general mobilisation in connection with martial law.
It is widely used as a synonym for the concept of ‘illegal mobilisation’, namely situations where military personnel from territorial recruitment and social support centres (hereafter – recruitment centres) ‘catch’ and forcibly load men of conscription age onto small minibuses on the streets and deliver them to recruitment centres to register them for further military service.
Currently, in Ukraine, over the last three months, there has been an increase in busification, with or without the use of force.
Busification takes two forms.
Either by deception, for example, a person is offered to undergo a medical examination voluntarily and be sent home, or they are asked to voluntarily go to the recruitment centre to be removed from the so-called wanted list and sent home.
Many men get into the minibus ‘voluntarily’, hoping that the recruitment centres will actually remove them from the wanted list, help them pass the medical examination, and let them go home. However, in most cases, men who are more or less aware of their rights and refuse to get into the minibus and go to the recruitment centres are beaten, have their arms and legs physically broken, have their ribs broken, are beaten and forcibly dragged into the minibus.
After the minibus has taken the men to the recruitment centre, their mobile phones are taken away, citing the special security regime of the recruitment centre building. In reality, they are deprived of contact with their families and any communication with the ‘outside world’ is restricted. In other words, psychological pressure is exerted on conscripts to force them to decide to undergo military service and to ensure that none of their relatives or lawyers can interfere with their illegal conscription.
Whereas previously the principle of territoriality applied, now, as a rule, conscripts are taken away from their place of residence or stay, but within the same region. This is also done so that neither relatives nor lawyers can find the person’s whereabouts, and so that no relatives can prevent the illegal mobilisation. By the time relatives and lawyers begin searching for the conscript, the illegal mobilisation process will already have taken place, and the conscript will have already left for the military unit’s training centre.
In the past two months of 2025, the mobilisation process takes 3–5 hours, i.e. from the moment of busification and to delivery of the conscript to the recruitment centre to dispatch to the military unit’s training centre.
At this time, the military medical commission procedure, which is a decisive factor in determining fitness for military service, sometimes takes several minutes. Of the entire military medical commission procedure, only the blood test is actually performed.
Even if the conscript has medical documents certifying illnesses or diagnoses with him, the documents are not considered in the best-case scenario. In the worst case, the medical documents are taken away illegally from the conscript by the staff of the recruitment centres and may even be thrown away and not returned. So, while relatives are getting duplicates of medical documents, the conscript will already be in the military and serving.
To protect a client from illegal mobilisation, it is not enough for a lawyer to know all the intricacies of military or mobilisation legislation, which is changing rapidly for the worse and restricting human rights.
A lawyer must know all the nuances of the work of each recruitment centre in which they defend their client. A lawyer must not be afraid to go against the ‘system’ of recruitment centres and, as part of defending their client, must open at least several criminal cases against the head of the recruitment centre for: 1) for the illegal deprivation of the client’s liberty; 2) forging the client’s military medical commission document; 3) torturing the client; 4) illegally taking blood from the client; 5) obstructing the provision of medical assistance by military personnel; 6) obstructing the lawyer’s activities by military personnel; 7) threats, or violence against the lawyer; 8) beating the lawyer while defending the client.
A lawyer must publicise the case in defence of the client and highlight the illegal actions on social media. Recruitment centres are not so much afraid of breaking the law as they are afraid that their illegal actions will be exposed on social media. Each recruitment centre is a ‘separate state’ within the Ukrainian state, with its own unwritten rules and laws. The only effective means of defending a client that remains for a lawyer is to publicise the violation of the law on social media and raise awareness of each specific case, as well as to file complaints with all possible law enforcement agencies.
When appealing the illegal mobilisation procedure in court, Ukrainian courts also quietly side with the recruitment centres, citing in their decisions the inevitability of military service and the fact that they are delaying the consideration of the case beyond the two months provided for by law, dragging out court proceedings for up to six months or even a year, citing the courts’ heavy workload. And while the court proceedings challenging the illegal mobilisation are being appealed, the person still has to perform military service.
It is no secret that during martial law, in the process of mobilisation, conscripts pay large sums of money to avoid military service. Moreover, the rates vary greatly.
The scale of corruption has increased. To avoid serving, conscripts pay large sums of money. There are certain individuals who offer intermediary services between conscripts and recruitment centres or military units and offer various types of services, from leaving recruitment centres to crossing the border. The rates for so-called ‘exemption from mobilisation’ range from 7 to 20 thousand dollars.
No one can interfere with the armed forces of Ukraine or mobilisation, but mobilisation must be carried out in accordance with the law; even under martial law, no one is entitled to violate the law.
