Desperate to avoid the draft

As 38-year-old Vitali trudged over barren fields and rutted roads for hours during a frigid night in January, he carried a backpack with a change of clothes and kept checking Google Maps on his smartphone.

The casino worker from Odesa, Ukraine, had spent months saving his money and agonizing over a decision on whether to steal away from his home in the middle of the night and sneak into neighbouring Moldova.

Like most men in Ukraine, Vitali, who only wanted to be identified by his first name, is banned from leaving the country under martial law, which the government declared after Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.

Some of his acquaintances had suggested the route to Moldova was the easiest and safest option out of the country.

If he was caught by Ukrainian border guards, he would be detained, fined and possibly sent to jail.

But he feared that if he stayed, he could be swept up into a war he doesn’t want to fight in.

“I was afraid of being taken to war. Now they have started taking everyone away,” he told CBC News during an interview from an immigration centre in Cahul, Moldova, a city just five kilometres from the border with Romania in the country’s southwest.

“It’s not safe to cross this way, but I was hoping maybe [the war] would actually end.”

Nearly two years after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, both countries are locked in a war of attrition. Ukraine’s military leaders say they need as many as 500,000 more soldiers to relieve exhausted troops and replace the tens of thousands killed and injured on the front line.

To help accomplish this, the government is mulling a contentious new mobilization bill that would make more men eligible for conscription and include additional sanctions for those who evade military service.

While the majority of men between the ages of 18 and 60 are prohibited from leaving, according to officials from four countries bordering Ukraine, more than 25,000 have crossed out illegally by traversing fields, forests and rivers, often in the middle of the night and sometimes with the help of a smuggler.

More than 18,000 others have been stopped by Ukraine while trying to flee over the border, while thousands more were caught at border checkpoints with documents the Ukrainian authorities deemed fake.

Moldova, a former republic of the Soviet Union, has seen the greatest number of the new arrivals among the four countries the men are primarily escaping to.

According to the country’s border policy agency, 15,000 people have crossed over illegally from Ukraine since the war began. Government officials say the vast majority of them are men who see Moldova as a stopping-off point before continuing on their journey to the European Union.

Vitali was living in Kharkiv at the start of the war, but as Russia started pummelling the city in Ukraine’s northeast, he left and eventually resettled in Odesa, which endures occasional missile attacks but has escaped the brunt of battle.

Like other men, he has seen the videos circulating on social media of military recruitment officers turning up at gyms and malls.

In the early days of the war, enthusiastic crowds enlisted to defend the country, but as the war has dragged on, the pool of volunteers has dried up.

“People are getting tired of it,” Vitali said.

“I just had to decide to leave my country…. I don’t know how we’re going to get back now, but that’s how it is.”

Vitali had told his parents, who are living in Zaporizhzhia, about his plan to leave and called them to say he made it out once he had been picked up by border police in Moldova and taken to a detachment, where he was briefly interviewed.

Moldova’s border police have stepped up patrols along the country’s 1,200-kilometre border with Ukraine, and head out nightly with drones and thermal imaging equipment to survey the remote patchwork of farm fields and rural roads.

CBC News went out with a crew as they worked in the early hours of the morning outside Valea-Perjei, a small village that lies one kilometre to the north and four kilometres to the west of Ukraine.

Senior Lt. Vladimir Curudimov, 24, has been operating the drone since October and says he often sees figures illuminated by thermal imagery walking towards the border.

“If he is approaching the border, I understand that in five minutes, 10 minutes, he probably will be entering our territory,“ he said.

“Each of them [says] that we’re running from the war.”

Once the men are arrested, they are taken to a border police detachment and questioned briefly about who they are and whether anyone helped them to cross.

In order to avoid being prosecuted for crossing the border, the men are required to claim asylum in Moldova, which officials say they then have to formally refuse if they head out to the European Union, as most do.

WATCH | Moldova Border Police say this video shows a man crossing the border illegally:

In the city of Cahul, in southwestern Moldova, half a dozen Ukrainian men stand outside an immigration centre smoking. Inside, others sit with paperwork clasped in their hands, waiting to have their photos taken and get fingerprinted.

Most of the men are visibly nervous and decline to speak with the media.

Their personal information will go into a government database, but Iurii Golban, head of the Southern Directorate with Moldova’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, said none of the details are shared with Ukraine.

He said crossing into southern Moldova is often seen as a preferred route because there are no rivers to navigate in the north like the Dniester, which runs through Ukraine and into Moldova.

On Moldova’s eastern flank lies Transnistria, a Russian-backed separatist region that Golban believes is rarely used as a transit point.

He said in the south those wanting to leave Ukraine only need to walk a few kilometres before they stumble upon small communities where they would be able to take a taxi or a bus to a larger city.

“Every day we are seeing more and more men,“ he told CBC News during an interview from his office in Cahul.

“Most of them are young people who have … big dreams.”

Under martial law, men are only able to leave Ukraine if they qualify for specific exemptions, including having more than three children under the age of 18 or being unfit for military service.

Only men 27 and older can be conscripted into the military, but they are able to voluntarily enlist at the age of 18.

With the country desperate to seize momentum on the battlefield and push Russian forces back from the territories it occupies, Ukraine’s parliament is considering a mobilization bill that could lower the draft age to 25 and place restrictions on those who have evaded service.

The first version of the bill was introduced in December and included measures that would allow draft offices to conscript men electronically instead of having to hand them a physical summons.

Those who evaded the draft would be placed on a register and could face restrictions when it comes to owning property or using a vehicle. The court could also order their bank accounts and assets to be frozen.

The bill was amended and resubmitted to parliament on Jan. 30 after lawmakers and civic groups criticized the original version, saying it violated the country’s constitution and carried corruption risks.

In August, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired all of the regional heads of the draft offices, accusing officials of corruption and even alleging that some took bribes from draft-eligible men to transport them out of the country.

Zelenskyy has also pointed to “systemic corruption” in granting medical exemptions, saying in some regions, the number being granted has increased 10-fold since February 2022.

On Telegram, a popular social media platform in Ukraine, CBC News found several accounts where users advertised services — ferrying people across the border and forging documents — for thousands of dollars.

Alla Tsymanovska, a medical lawyer splitting her time between Ukraine and Germany, told CBC News that there are thousands of criminal cases underway in Ukraine right now for men who are accused of trying to avoid military service and for those who help them.

If caught by the Ukrainian authorities trying to sneak out or fabricate an exemption, people can be fined. If they are convicted of a criminal charge, they can be sent to prison. The sentence for evading conscription is up to five years in prison.

WATCH | Leaving Ukraine to avoid the draft:

Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service frequently publishes photos and videos on Facebook and on YouTube of its officers intercepting men who are trying to sneak out of the country.

In the images, the faces of men are blurred but they are often lined up in rows or lying in a field face down after being spotted by officers.

In a highly produced video posted to YouTube in January, Ukraine’s border guard agency warned that men could drown while trying to escape Ukraine.

WATCH | The State Border Guard Service of Ukraine says this video shows a man being rescued after wandering in the mountains:

Officials say since the invasion began, 19 bodies have been found in the Tisa River, which forms part of the border between Ukraine and Romania.

The narrator of the video warns that death can happen to “anyone who dares to escape from a country where his peers with weapons in their hands” choose to fight for Ukrainian sovereignty.

The imagery and language are an attempt to try to deter men from leaving, but 28-year-old Vladimir, who also didn’t want his last name used, said he doesn’t feel guilty at all and believes the risk was worth taking.

Prior to leaving Ukraine, he said, he would try to avoid being out in public and would take a circuitous route to work to avoid walking by the draft office.

“I don’t want to kill anyone. I want to live in peace,“ he told CBC News in the Moldovan town of Congaz, where he is staying in a shelter for Ukrainian refugees.

He said he has seen his acquaintances drafted and believes it’s useless to send a man who doesn’t want to fight to the front line because the authorities would just be leading him to his slaughter.

“I wouldn’t want to come home in a coffin or disabled.”

The issue of martial law and just who is mobilized has created gaps in Ukrainian society that widen as the war grinds on, said Dmytro Tuzhanskyi, a political scientist living in the western Ukrainiain city of Uzhhorod.

During the first weeks of the invasion, Tuzhanskyi was working as an international observer for the Hungarian election, but says he chose to return to Ukraine even though there was the possibility he would be drafted.

He said he has registered with the military office in his city and could be conscripted at any time, but believes Ukraine is fighting for its survival and has no other choice.

“Martial law is the only … rational way when you have a real war,” he told CBC News in an interview via Zoom.

“This is the reality we all live in.”

WATCH | Fleeing to dodge the draft in Ukraine:

He said the topic of mobilization is dominating discussion in Ukraine and while he believes leaving the country is a personal choice, he feels men who abuse the law need to be prosecuted.

The exact number of soldiers serving in Ukraine’s military is unknown, but officials have previously said one million people are “under arms,” which would dwarf the number of confirmed illegal crossings.

“Yes, not a lot of people want to be mobilized like me, but at the same time it doesn’t mean that these people want to escape or these people want to give up,” said Tuzhanskyi.

But back in Congaz, Moldova, 42-year-old Sergei, who walked for hours through muddy fields in January to get out of Ukraine, speaks about a weariness that has set in on some as the war approaches its two-year anniversary.

He, too, is fearful of revealing his full name, but said since leaving, he has received messages from friends asking for his advice on getting out.

He insists he is a patriot, but not the kind who will stay and risk being sent to a trench with a weapon.

“You can love [your homeland] in different ways,” he said.

“Every man needs to have a choice.”

​Top image: Border Police of the Republic of Moldova | Editing: Janet Davison