This week, somewhere over the heads of the soldiers fighting and dying on the front line, beyond the residential buildings being shelled night after night, peace negotiations are taking place.

I recently returned to Berlin from Kyiv. Until the day I left, there was no heating in my apartment. When the power was cut off after repeated attacks on the city’s energy infrastructure, my electric heaters stopped working. In the November cold, the house slowly lost its warmth. The whole building, the entire neighbourhood, sank into darkness. Electricity is like blood, filling the countless wires around us. As it disappeared, it felt as if life was draining out of the city’s pulsating body, drop by drop.

Thousands of homes in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities were without electricity or heating throughout November, and remain so as December arrives. At night, the air-raid sirens would frequently sound – too often followed by explosions. By morning, we would hear reports of the dead, and of those who had lost their homes.

These latest attempts at peace talks are far from the first. Several “bad peace” agreements have already been rejected – followed by notes of satisfied righteousness in the international media. Over time, the very idea of peace has acquired a bad reputation. It is viewed as “peace by coercion”.

I have taken part in several discussions about potential peace scenarios over the past two years. Almost all of them have viewed the conflict through the lens of international law, geopolitics and the need to forcefully respond to the aggressor. In other words, to establish, in relation to Russia, the rule of “peace through strength”, and to make Ukraine “indigestible” for Russia, as Ursula von der Leyen said this August. As if being part of another’s digestive process could ever bring any good to a country or its allies. In this war, symbolic language has served as a new Iron Curtain, concealing the reality that an alternative to a “bad peace” is nothing other than war itself, in all its forms.

This article was written mostly during August and October, at a time when it felt necessary to describe the violence that has been required to sustain armed resistance. I felt as though I were telling the world something essential – something the politicians had somehow overlooked as they discussed the prospect of the war lasting until 2030, all the while offering no new proposals.

Now I find myself thinking, far too often, that I am merely repeating something that is already well known. The detail has been noticed; people simply choose not to speak about it. At a certain point, writing about this subject even began to seem useless to me.

A friend of mine, who is now in the army, said to me this week: “I won’t let them forget this.” I dedicate this article to his words.

A string of messages appeared on my phone as I sat down to write one day in August: “They’re going down Vidradne hopping out of a black car”… “Hatne – car checks, it’s bad, full raid”… “at Hnata Yury metro station right on the platform a couple of eggplants with a tablet… be careful out there!” These live updates were posted on Telegram, on one of the many channels that civilians in Kyiv have formed to warn one another about conscription raids.

I recognise the code words. An “eggplant” is a policeman or TCK (“territorial recruitment centre”) officer, so called because of the colour of their uniform. If a neighbourhood has “sunny weather” or is “clean” then no one is checking mobilisation documents there. Most messages are in Ukrainian, and their tone is often intimate, as if addressing a relative. Then, suddenly, an absurd political update slips in. For instance, “Intersection of Dnipro embankment and Truskavetska St. all clean, no fuzz” is followed by “The war between Russia and Ukraine will end someday, I’m thinking – Trump.”

A few hours after they’re published, these messages are erased. I copy them to preserve proof for my article. Participating in such channels is a criminal offense. Some of their founders and administrators have already been prosecuted and may go to jail. The security service periodically publishes photographs of these arrests as a form of intimidation. Amid the omnipresent wartime media coverage, a few exemplary acts of punishment can be enough to spread fear. Nevertheless, as soon as one channel closes, another identical one pops up.

The channels are strictly anonymous. People do not talk about participating in them. In this way, a kind of community arises spontaneously, without personal ties or contacts. Hiding behind pseudonyms and avatars, people help each other, speak to one another, and even debate politics.

These channels exist across Ukraine. They are part of the underground life of cities whose external surfaces are periodically covered by recruitment ads for military battalions. In Kyiv, these notices are often put up in the same places where there used to be posters for Hollywood blockbusters.

Or at least it seems that way, because the recruitment campaigns draw on the same visual language. Soldiers in the Charter Battalion are depicted as giants. They sit on buildings as if they are chairs, brace their knees against bridges, rest their elbows on office blocks. They might crush a tower with a single stride or knock over a wall with a stray movement of their shoulder.

Some famous battalions have their own poster series. Those for the “Third Storm Brigade” show a laughing soldier with a bloodstained sword flying astride a gigantic fluffy cat over zombie-like civilians whose faces are partly crusted with dried blood. They photograph him and reach towards with their hands, as if unaware that he intends to destroy them. The pretty cat fights alongside him; droplets of blood cling to its claws. The caption reads: “Third Storm Brigade. Preparing for any scenario”.

There are also posters aimed specifically at volunteers under the age of 24, who are exempted from mandatory conscription. Some feature anime or cartoon illustrations and depict war as a kind of computer game. One poster offered a lottery for young volunteers with a payout of UAH 1 million.

With their exaggerated depictions of power, these posters might appeal to those who feel powerless. They offer an illusion of strength, influence and control. Their phantasmagoric, even anti-realistic style depicts war as a fantasy. The conflict seems to unfold in a game world, where characters can be “upgraded” by gaining extra lives, health and strength.

One of the recurring phrases of this war inhabits the same fantastical dimension: ‘Heroes do not die.’ We read it in the obituaries that fill our Facebook feeds and hear it at the funerals of murdered soldiers. At times, I have wanted to believe it, or at least to feel some truth in it. Another expression follows the same logic: ‘forever 19,’ ‘forever 31,’ or whatever age the soldier was at the time of his death. As if we were speaking not about a life cut short, but rather a recipe for eternal youth.

The idea of immortality feels especially paradoxical when someone you love dies. On 18 August, at Independence Maidan in downtown Kyiv, we paid our last respects to my friend, the artist and anarchist David Chichkan, who was killed in battle. He volunteered in October 2024, and served in a mortar crew. Many of his closest comrades from Ukraine’s anarchist movements had signed up even earlier.

David’s funeral brought together artists and curators, leftists and anarchists, members of queer communities and soldiers. In their reminiscences, his fellow crew members noted that he wasn’t afraid of “hard work”, that he built blinds and was willing to sit in the trenches “like a regular guy”.

Nearly everyone who spoke also mentioned the fact that he did not necessarily have to fight. “He could have used his connections in the art world and left for another country,” said one. “He was famous enough that he could have served in an easier role at the front, or perhaps could have helped the Ukrainian army from the rear,” said another. These statements, intended to honour the memory of a brave and very kind person, unintentionally cast a narrow shaft of light onto the invisible hierarchies in the army – an institution that many fear to enter, and from which others try to escape.

This year alone, more than 160,000 cases of soldiers going AWOL (absent without leave) have been recorded. As a journalist noted in Deutsche Welle: “AWOL has become an everyday expression in Ukraine”.¹ While researching this subject, I keep running into descriptions of future soldiers as ‘mobilisation resources’. Soldiers sometimes themselves write ironically: “We are mobilisation material.” The concept of the “human resource” is just as unreal as the image of the immortal hero.

Ukraine’s conscription laws have been revised multiple times since the full-scale invasion in 2022. Initially, shocked by Russia’s aggression, many volunteers set out for the front with hope, and even faith, that the war would end soon. The invading army was relatively small, as if expecting little resistance and an easy victory. Instead, the first year of fighting resulted in enormous casualties and losses. It was hard to believe that a crime like this would turn into a drawn-out conflict. But peace was not achieved and, as the Russian forces grew three times in size, the need for more Ukrainian soldiers also kept growing.

In May 2024, in the face of a renewed Russian offensive, the conscription age was lowered from 27 to 25, limited duty status was almost eliminated, and all men between the ages of 18 and 60 were required to update their personal information in a state database. Furthermore, all men of mobilisation age are considered liable for military service, and those over 22 are not allowed to leave the country. Exemption from mobilisation has become a privilege, and even those who have it feel unprotected: exemptions are periodically reviewed and rendered invalid by further legal changes. Initially, the new law was meant to include provisions for the demobilisation of soldiers after they had served for 36 months, but this clause was subsequently removed, apparently because of chronic deficit of military personnel on the frontlines.

Despite the threat of fines, a reported 1.5 million men have not updated their information on the database. If these figures are even remotely accurate, then an enormous number of people wish to avoid mobilisation, or do not trust the state conscription process. Figures of this scale speak for themselves. They also reveal that in this war there exists a vast territory of silence – a space for people’s opinions, doubts and decisions, which find no path to public expression, and may not even be fully formed as political positions or judgements.

But where there are no words, there are still actions: hiding, avoiding or disobeying the order to fight.

Since the updated draft law came into effect, the Ukrainian internet has been overflowing with videos of forced conscription – and of resistance. They are filmed by passersby and uploaded to social networks, but the international media conspicuously ignores them.

Scroll through these videos and you might see a man desperately struggling against soldiers, who then throw him into a bus. This is called “busification”. Scroll further and you might see people breaking into conscription centres, which tend to be located at former Soviet military recruitment offices, and attempting to free men who have been forcibly detained.

These images usually circulate anonymously. Filming or publishing them could result in criminal prosecution. I am often unable to watch videos like this all the way to the end. They leave me with a feeling of limitless helplessness, in part because hardly anyone seems to acknowledge them publicly. It is as if everyone has agreed not to discuss what we are all seeing. Lately I’ve been asking myself: Can it be be that people aren’t seeing these videos? Not hearing these cries for help and pleas to spread this information widely?

Some of my friends talk about these videos in their kitchens, like people used to in the dissident era. But out in the public sphere, it is as if nothing is happening. We no longer live within the boundaries of national states. News circulates internationally, and the inability to address violations of human rights has also become an international process. It is as if our society – and international discourse as well – has fallen under a collective spell.

I even worried I was going insane, because I was constantly seeing things that, for too many other people, remained insignificant. I hear over and over again from colleagues in European cities comments like: “Now is not the time to talk about that.” The demand to remain silent about the complex dynamics of resistance to Russian aggression is something that has not been truly reflected upon. In my view, this demand has in fact become the background policy for many respected media outlets. Political activists who support Ukraine have told me too often that “if these facts become known, it will be impossible to convince the Europeans to help Ukraine”.

This line of argument acts as an obstacle to discussion, and a form of self-censorship. It helps create the illusions that make it possible to exclude whole fragments of reality, and to look away from so much of the trauma, pain and internal violence that has permeated a society engaged in a protracted war.

I have started to think that this silence gives rise to the image of a country that wants to wage war – a heroic society, united in its opinions and preferences. This is what Ukraine looks like in the campaigns of its information war, in which politicians, journalists and activists talk proudly of taking part.

The longer these videos go unacknowledged, the more we all seem to grow accustomed to violence. But I want to describe some of the things I have seen in them, so that they remain in memory, and do not sink beneath an ocean of similar stories.

The events in one video took place somewhere in Vinnytsia Oblast. It was a shot by a woman in the passenger seat of a car that has stopped on a road. She turns around to film her two skinny daughters in the back seat, perhaps aged seven or eight. They both have delicate faces and blond hair. For the first few seconds, they seem curious, even happy. But you can hear their parents shouting in the front of the car.

“Look what’s happening!” the woman cries. “They’re hitting our car! A TCK guy!”

The little girls scream, then cross themselves and pray loudly: “Oh Lord, help us please! Oh Lord, help up please!”

The mother tries to explain what is happening. The father, who was driving, had not stopped when signalled to do so by the TCK. Soldiers from the mobilization centre had chased them, and when they finally halted, one of the soldiers got out and started hitting their car, smashing the window next to the driver’s seat. As the children watch, the father is forcibly taken for mobilisation. The video ends with him being led away.

The involvement of children as witnesses to the mobilisation process is another aspect of what is happening – and one that will have consequences. A friend of mine who has epilepsy escaped on foot from the TCK with the help of his 10-year-old daughter; she even tried to distract the soldiers so her father could get away. This autumn, a video circulated in which schoolchildren filmed the TCK coming for their PE teacher. Their comments revealed how frightened and outraged they were. The school forbade them from publishing the video, but someone posted it anyway.

Another video, this one from the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Soldiers in civilian clothes drag a man by the arms into a draft bus. He yells, cries for help, tries to resist. He’s nearly naked, his clothes stripped off him during the struggle. Out of sight, a woman screams: “They’re kidnapping someone!”

In October, the actor Elena Repina, who appeared alongside now-president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the famous television series Servant of the People, spent the night on the street outside the conscription centre where her husband was being held; they are both 59 years old. She recorded a series of messages and posted them on her Facebook page, even describing the TCK as “fascists”. This time the media quickly picked up the story, and her husband was freed the next day – the only such case I am aware of.

Dmytro Voloshin, a commander of the 8^th Air Assault Corps, has admitted that practically all the men in his unit were busified. “They fight well,” he said in a video posted on Facebook. “What else are they going to do? The most important thing is to create the right conditions for a person to have faith in their ability to carry out a task.” A comment under the video reads: “Creating the right conditions means beating the person up so hard, scaring them so bad they’ll be more afraid of their commanding officers than the enemy.”

One morning, I saw a video filmed on the beach in Odesa. A group of kids by the water’s edge is “playing TCK”. Two boys are chasing another, holding him by the arms. He tries to break away, but it’s hopeless. They march him to his fate.

The past few months have seen a wave of clashes between civilians and conscription brigades. Veterans and demobilised soldiers often participate on the side of the civilians. In August, there were spontaneous demonstrations in the cities of Kovel and Vinnytsia; people tried to break into conscription centres and liberate those held inside. For some reason, the international news media ignored these evocative protests.

This kind of civil disobedience irked the far-right politician Dmytro Korchinsky, who called on soldiers to open fire on anyone who resists conscription. His strange, marginal and deliberately provocative role seems to consist in pushing the boundaries of what is permissible in the public sphere. And his call was heard, it seems. On 19 August, in the village of Novi Chervishcha in Volyn Oblast, TCK employees opened fire on a group of female pensioners.

One of the women later spoke to the local TV channel. She and her friends saw the TCK officers chasing after a disabled person they knew. They tried to intervene, and threw rocks at the conscription brigade vehicle, at which point the officers fire, hitting one of the women in the cheek, forcing her to be hospitalized.

Before the war, it was common for people to manage their health problems outside of the state healthcare system; even serious or chronic illnesses often went unregistered. These people now find themselves “unofficially ill” or “unofficially disabled” – and thus subject to conscription.

On 9 October, a conscription centre in Cherkasy published an official statement about the death of another man with epilepsy who died while undergoing his medical examination. The case is under investigation. But there have been many other such incidents.

An acquaintance’s husband, who has epilepsy, was forcibly drafted this spring, and later went missing in action on the front line.

I know a 55-year-old translator with several chronic medical conditions who broke his own collarbone so that he would not be mobilised. He told me that was the most reliable method.

I know a designer who had their kidney removed in order to qualify for the disability exemption.

A friend of mine was kidnapped right off the street in Kyiv.

On Telegram, I learnt that a conscript in Kyiv cut his hands and neck to be let out.

On Instagram, a well-known volunteer from Zaporizhia relates the story of a murder in a conscription centre. Her friend’s father, a 52-year-old former combatant, was forcibly reconscripted, and died less than 24 hours later. When his body was returned to the family the following week, it bore signs of repeated beatings. The photo shows a smiling father and daughter, with the Ukrainian caption: “My father was killed! Please spread the word!” The volunteer is appealing to journalists, to civil society: tell this story. But, of course, no one intends to tell it. The story is already almost forgotten, buried under others that seem more dramatic.

Recently I have been awaiting calls from a military training facility in Western Ukraine. An artist friend of mine and his new acquaintance, a chemistry lecturer at a university, are held there as conscripts. Both men are opposed in principle to the use of force and violent struggle. The scientist is very ill, and may have a serious kidney disease. But he has been denied medical aid because conscripts have attempted to desert from the hospital.

Both of their phones were confiscated – a common practice in conscription centres and training units. Sometimes there is no word from mobilised men for weeks; their families do not even know if they are alive. But some conscripts manage to keep a phone illegally, and my friend’s fellow soldiers call me to pass on updates.

The conscripts who call me say that almost all the men currently in the training unit had been brought in through forced mobilisation. That is, they were stopped in the middle of the street, in the doorways of their homes, in the midst of ordinary daily activities. Many of them screamed and resisted, but they were busified. I learn that the training facility practises forms of ritual punishment: if a conscript refuses to sign documents claiming to have volunteered, or tries to run away, he is tied to a tree, insulted and humiliated by other soldiers. This continues even in the winter.

A few conscripts who refused to take up arms were sent to the frontline without training – or their phones. There were rumours that conscripts had been beaten or even shot for trying to flee. International military specialists are present at the centres, but they evidently don’t see any irregularities.²

I later met the elderly mother of a computer programmer who had been forcibly drafted. “I begged my son – don’t stand out, just sign all the papers, try not to get noticed and do whatever they tell you to,” she told me. “We have no other choice. Otherwise, he might get killed out there.”

The news of David Chichkan’s death destroyed a part of my world; the grief of this loss pursues me. But so do attacks on the freedom of civilians, the operation of illegal prisons, and military service contracts signed under threats of violence or through torture – all of these things tear at the fabric of society, destroying the very foundations of human dignity.

Why is the entire space of war buzzing with imposed silence? This war has created the illusion that acknowledging one kind of experience diminishes another – as if the very freedom to choose devalues the choice of joining the resistance; as if acknowledging and opposing internal violence in a society defending itself will always mean “working for the enemy”.

Silence not only fails to support Ukrainian society. It normalises and legitimises an abnormal, criminal situation. It forces people to accept that violence is natural, is to be expected, is part and parcel of society. The cry for help receives no response. And that is also a response.

1. In Ukrainian the acronym is СЗЧ [SZCh], which stands for samovil’ne zalishennia chastyny (unauthorized desertion of unit).
2. The presence of international trainers has not been widely reported in the press, but I have learned about it from conscripts.