Bribes, TikTok, and escapes through disused pipelines — Ukraine's SBU reveals 'mobilization evasion schemes'
Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) on Dec. 23 revealed details of several alleged "mobilization evasion schemes" it had uncovered, leading to the arrest of eight ringleaders who now face up to ten years each in prison.
Under martial law, Ukrainian men aged 25 to 60 are subject to conscription and are forbidden from leaving the country except under a certain number of specific circumstances.
Illegal border crossing schemes have sprung up across the country, deepening the manpower shortages facing the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
In one such scheme, the SBU said it had arrested a 62-year-old man from Lviv who "delivered" evaders to the west of the country before "laying out an escape route for them to the EU through a non-working gas pipeline."
He worked in conjunction with another Ukrainian man living in the EU who advertised their services on TikTok and met them at the other side of the pipeline when they emerged, the SBU said.
In Poltava Oblast, the SBU arrested a 48-year-old former law enforcement officer who ran a scheme obtaining fake medical certificates from neurologists he was "familiar" with.
"As the investigation established, draft evaders were first registered as 'inpatients' in local medical institutions, and then they were given fictitious discharge papers with serious diagnoses," the SBU said.
Other schemes were not quite as imaginative — one in Odesa involved a man disguised as a military officer simply transporting people in the trunk of his car, while another involved issuing camouflage clothing and sending people along a long forest trail.
Around 49,000 draft-age men have been detained at border areas and checkpoints while trying to illegally cross Ukraine's border since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Andrii Demchenko, spokesperson for Ukraine's State Border Guard Service, said in May.
