Busifikatsiya

Working together, America and Europe can surely get a lot more young Ukrainian men dragged off screaming to the front lines, right?

A man flees a conscription press gang in Odessa.

Millions are in hiding.

Those who have escaped Ukraine are fanned out across Europe, clinging to low-pay jobs and temporary housing. But Europe’s leaders are impatient with them. The young Ukrainian men should go back, they say. They should be sent to the front to fight the young Russian men, and to kill as many as possible before they themselves die or at least have an arm or leg blown off, as has already happened to hundreds of thousands of their countrymen. It’s only right.

“All young Ukrainians fit for combat should be in Ukraine and serve their homeland there,” says Poland’s defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz.

Poland hosts nearly 1 million Ukrainian refugees, including tens of thousands of military-age men. Kosiniak-Kamysz says the men have “a civic duty” to go back and face a good quick death.

Similar ship-’em-to-the-front rhetoric has been voiced from Lithuania to Switzerland.

In Germany, which hosts more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees (even more than Poland), the chancellor recently telephoned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to ask that he keep his people from escaping in the first place. That would be so much tidier than Germany having to round them up.

Zelensky has been trying. Border guards with dogs and thermal cameras hunt down the young men trying to escape. More than two dozen have drowned trying to swim the Tisza River on the borders with Hungary, while others have fallen to their deaths climbing the Carpathian Mountains to Romania. As further discouragement, Ukrainian border guards have shared video of wolves a would-be border crosser might meet in the dark, and have publicized the case of a Ukrainian man who called them on his cell phone for a rescue after wolves chased him up a tree (they arrested him; for all we know, he’s at the front lines now, or dead).

As of August 5, swimming rivers and fleeing wolves to reach Europe is less attractive. Under “European Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1912”, military-aged Ukrainians who show up at the borders without the right papers will be sent back to fight.

“Taking into account Ukraine’s evolving defence needs, going forward temporary protection will be granted only to those who satisfy their military obligations in Ukraine,” the EU announced (bold emphasis in original). “This limitation will only apply to new applicants for temporary protection. It will not apply to those already benefiting from temporary protection in the EU.”

Although they are eager to feed more Ukrainians into the war, Europe’s leaders will do so as quietly as possible. At least for now, they won’t be dragging young men out of low-key jobs at cafes and construction sites and stuffing them into buses. They know this would be dangerously unpopular — in part because they’ve been watching the Zelensky government grow ever-more hated while doing that very thing to Ukraine’s citizens back home.

Busifikatsiya

Among the men hiding from this war include not just those who fled Ukraine, but the millions who couldn’t or wouldn’t. Those men lie low. Many of them loathe the CIA-backed, right-wing, ethno-nationalist dictatorship that rules their country now. All of them watch fearfully for the unmarked cars with tinted windows, the SUVs, vans and buses, that prowl the streets of nearly every town, filled with hard men ready to jump out, tackle them, and frogmarch them off to war.

There’s a slang term in Ukrainian for being snatched off of the street by the military: busifikatsiya, or “bus-ification”. It captures the idea of being violently shoved into a bus and driven off to a likely death.

The Internet is overflowing with videos of this unsavory process. Many are posted at busification.org. Some are quite graphic: busifikatsiya itself has caused 62 known deaths. But even scenes as mild as the four videos offered below are rarely shown in Western media: they don’t fit the narrative that we’re “helping,” with our disdain for peace and our proud eagerness to fight to the last Ukrainian.

A typical example of busifikatsiya is this July 13 security camera video of a young man hunted down through a parking lot in the central Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia. (I have been to Vinnytsia and used to have family nearby.)

Or this residential security camera video from the town of Poltava, 300 miles to the east on that same day, of an efficiently busifikatsiya’d bicyclist.

Those two young men were seized upon in quiet places and thus were easy pickings.

In other scenarios, crowds coalesce to interfere. In this July 7 video from Odesa, a pleasant day of yard work turns into a family’s nightmare. One man pounds on the press gang’s unmarked van with his rake and another gets pepper-sprayed, but we never see the victim himself:

Citizen resistance — spontaneous, uncertain, uncoordinated — usually fails to the ruthless counter-violence of the press gangs. This is so even when determined friends and family do their best, as in this June 25 video from the northern Ukrainian town of Lutsk:

Citizen resistance doesn’t always fail. Occasionally, Ukrainian crowds have managed to flip over busifikatsiya vehicles, or to otherwise help a young man wriggle free and run away. In sadder cases, men have jumped off bridges or out of third-floor windows to their deaths rather than be conscripted; or, upon arrival to the recruitment centers, have slit their wrists or hung themselves with their belts; or have stabbed to death the doctor who just medically cleared them for service.

Why we’re allowed to see these videos

It’s striking how widely available the busifikatsiya videos are. They’re easier to find than, say, the horrific footage soldiers post from the front lines, where first-person-view drones hunt down terrified young men, amid a landscape spiderwebbed over by so many thousands of miles of gossamer-thin fiber-optic drone cables that the birds are making nests from them.

One of many photos of a fiber-optic cable bird’s nest, this one posted by Ukrainian military.

In past, inconvenient information about our proxy war in Ukraine has been scrubbed from the Internet. We know this courtesy of an investigation by U.S. Congressional staff, which found that the FBI — working in tandem with the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU — had flagged “thousands of accounts to remove” from Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.

Early in the war, the Ukrainian spy agency arranged to have more than 5,000 American critics deleted from Facebook. It’s incredible that’s not a bigger story.

A calendar of Ukrainian spy agency requests in March 2022 alone passed along by the FBI to various U.S. social media that identified thousands of accounts or posts to be deleted, according to a U.S. Congressional investigation.

So, why haven’t busifikatsiya videos — with their damning window into the fear and violence we’re supporting — also been more diligently scrubbed? Perhaps they soon will be. For now, however, it’s likely we can see them because American officials, like the European Union officials, have been demanding exactly this: They want more busifikatisya.

As the late Lindsey Graham lectured Ukraine this spring: “We need more people on the front lines.”

The never-married, always-childless, pro-every-war Senator from South Carolina was so outraged that the Ukrainian draft age began at 27 that he flew all the way from America to Kyiv (at our expense) to tell the Ukrainians off. Nor was he satisfied when Kyiv grudgingly lowered it to age 25.

“I can’t believe the [age] limit is 27,” Graham scolded Ukraine’s parliament. “You are fighting to survive, you should serve [at any age], not at 25 or 27.”

Ukraine’s leaders reply that killing off the teenagers and twentysomethings before they can at least father a child or two could erase their nation. Apparently this war is a fight to survive not just the Russians, but also the Americans.

Back in 2022, Russia and Ukraine were ready to settle matters after just the first two weeks of war. Five weeks in, the two sides had hammered out a peace deal far more favorable to Ukraine than anything that will ever be achieved today. But as has been exhaustively documented, Washington vetoed that peace agreement, and sent them all back to work on our war.

“If we simply mobilize all young men aged 18-25,” says Zelensky’s chief of staff, “we will destroy the very future of our state, an entire generation.”

Democrats and Republicans nevertheless want Ukrainians to sacrifice their teenagers.

“I can confirm it: American politicians from both parties are putting pressure on President Zelensky to explain why there is no mobilization of those aged 18 to 25 in Ukraine,” wrote Serhiy Leshchenko, an advisor to the president’s chief of staff. He said Ukrainian officials were repeatedly reminded that during America’s war with Vietnam, we drafted people from age 18.

Leshchenko’s Telegram post. (In a likely typo he says American men were drafted into the Vietnam War from age 19, instead of 18).

The military is apparently starting to make lists of the younger men it might conscript. Two weeks ago, Zelensky’s government announced it had ordered the tax authorities to give the Ministry of Defense information about all taxpayers starting from age 18.

That came just days after a new sweeping expansion of who will be eligible for the draft. There will be no more exemptions for men just because they are caring for a disabled spouse, for example; or going to university if it’s only a likely draft dodge like night school or for “a second or third” university degree.

My personal favorite canceled exemption: Being a single dad no longer lets you off. Always provided that the mom can be tracked down and forced to watch the kids. The newest regulations specify that the mom can’t be dead, missing, in jail, or previously declared an unfit parent.

But by all means, let’s pour more money and political energy into keeping this war going.