Ukraine on alert over series of attacks on recruitment offices

Four attacks in five days targeting military recruits have set off alarm bells in Ukraine. The latest attack occurred on Wednesday in the western Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilskyi, when a bomb exploded near an army recruitment office (TCC), killing one person and wounding four others. Police told national public broadcaster Suspilne that the deceased was the person who planted the bomb. These incidents come amid growing public unrest over regulations extending recruitment in the face of Russia’s invasion.

An explosion on Sunday night injured one person outside a recruitment office in Pavlograd, in the east of the country. Another bomb inside a recruitment center in the city of Rivne last Saturday killed one person and injured six others. Also on February 1, a man opened fire on a recruitment patrol in Poltava province to free a young man who had been drafted. One soldier was killed.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has determined that the person killed in the Rivne bombing was carrying the explosive, a 21-year-old unemployed man who was contacted by the Russian security services to carry out the attack in exchange for money. The SSU claims that the device was detonated remotely. Three young men were arrested as suspected perpetrators of the Poltava attack. They have not yet been formally charged with having acted under Russian instructions.

The fact that several attacks — the first involving explosives against targets in Ukraine — have occurred in such a short period of time has led authorities to believe that this could be a Russian destabilization operation. Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, an agency of the National Security Council of Ukraine, reiterated on Wednesday his belief that Russia is behind what happened: “They are looking for teenagers and young people who are poorly informed to carry out sabotage in exchange for money, often without going into details. The Russians simply use them and throw them away.”

The deputy head of the SSU, Serhii Andrushchenko, said at a press conference on Wednesday that since 2024 the police had arrested almost 50 people accused of planning sabotage against railway and military facilities, including TCC offices. “By carrying out terrorist attacks against the army, the Russian special services want to discredit the mobilization process and fuel the population’s distrust of the Armed Forces,” the SSU said in a statement.

But neither the media nor, above all, the military leadership have ruled out the possibility that there may also be radical actions against compulsory conscription, such as the murder of the TCC soldier in Poltava on February 1. The perpetrators were arrested.

Since the end of 2023, after the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, few men in Ukraine want to volunteer for the army. The fighting spirit of the population, very high at the beginning of the invasion in 2022, has been decreasing as progress on the front has been halted. But the Ukrainian army urgently needs new troops to replace soldiers who have been killed or who are deserting due to exhaustion. The lack of personnel is pressing and an example was offered to EL PAÍS on Monday by a company commander in the 61st Ukrainian Mechanized Brigade: according to this officer, if in 2022 soldiers in the defensive positions on the front were rotated every week, now they are relieved every five weeks.

Discontent among the military leadership

A new mobilization law came into force last spring, leading to increased recruitment with greater punitive resources. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy postponed the passage of the law for months, aware of its unpopularity. Skirmishes between civilians and TCC personnel are common, especially when military personnel use force to take individuals who resist their authority to recruiting offices. TCC heavy-handedness has been the subject of bitter debate in Ukraine and criticism even within the military establishment, but what has happened in recent days is unprecedented, as Major-General Mikhail Drapati said on February 2: “The killing of soldiers in the rear is a red line that we must not cross. We cannot remain silent as contempt for the defenders of Ukraine grows. This is beyond what is tolerable.”

Both Drapati and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrskyi have demanded that the civilian authorities take exemplary measures against the attackers. “Violence against military personnel is unacceptable. The perpetrators must be punished accordingly. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are doing everything possible to protect the state and the Ukrainian people. In this situation of large-scale war, this is impossible without mobilization measures,” Syrskyi stressed on Monday. On February 4, immediately after the statements by the Ukrainian military leadership, a resident of Poltava was sentenced to six years in prison after filming a TCC patrol and hurling insults at its members in 2023. The man later posted the video on social media.

There is unrest in the military because the TCC patrols are considered to have been under too much pressure for too long. Yuri Ignat, head of communications for the Air Force, recalled another previous case of violence against TCC officers, in 2024: “The humiliations and threats against military personnel have been going on for years. Just remember that guy who was on horseback and almost killed a soldier with an axe. Did they even bring him before a judge?”

The Ukrainian army has about 800,000 personnel, but the number of people involved in the country’s defence may exceed a million if the National Guard brigades under the auspices of the Interior Ministry are included. The New York Times, based on private obituaries, estimates that the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war may be as many as 100,000. To this should be added a higher number of wounded and also the tens of thousands of soldiers who have deserted since last year. Zelenskiy said on Tuesday, in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan, that the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed was 45,100, and that the number of wounded was over 390,000. The Ukrainian president said that the number of Russian soldiers wounded was twice that, and that the death toll among Russian forces stood at 350,000.

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