Three kilometres an hour was all it took to tip Yan from one Ukrainian life into another.
Until Kyiv traffic police stopped him in July for driving a whisker over the speed limit, he had been one of hundreds of thousands of men of draft age who have quietly evaded the Ukrainian army’s stumbling efforts to bolster its ranks.
Now he is a lieutenant recently arrived at a base some 30km from the front line, having completed four months of training, fled from his designated unit, and joined another where he hopes he can be more useful – and have a better chance of survival.
The Irish Times could not verify all of Yan’s story – which he shared in messages over six weeks on condition that his real name not be used – but it tallies with other accounts of a draft system that many conscripts say is outdated, bureaucratic, dishonest and wasteful of their specific skills and experience.
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Yan (37) was working for a group that builds drones for the military early this summer, when he received notification via Ukraine’s online conscription app that the draft office was looking for him.
Ukraine encourages men to apply to military units of their choice rather than waiting for conscription officers to catch them, and Yan says he was arranging to join a brigade that is a regular customer of this drone maker when Kyiv traffic police pulled him over.
“I was three kilometres per hour over the speed limit. They gave me a ticket and after checking my name in the system they told me they were going to deliver me to the conscription office,” he says. “They said I could go peacefully, or they would take me in handcuffs.”
Yan called the recruitment centre of the brigade that he had intended to join, so they could quickly sign him up and keep him out of the general conscription system, and someone from that centre set off from the other side of Kyiv to come and get him.
“At the draft office they said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll let the guy in, we don’t do anything bad to people who are ready to serve.’ But as soon as I was through the gates the rules changed, and they said, ‘There’s no way we’re letting him in here, you’re going straight to the army’. They did everything very quickly, so the guy didn’t arrive in time,” Yan recalls.
“It had just been a lie. And that basically happened at every stage of recruitment. They lie that the next stage will be better, you will be treated fairly, that at this stage they can’t do anything now, they just have to pass you on to the next – and then at the next stage they say, ‘Oh, that’s what they told you. Well, it’s not true and this is how it really is.’
“Even at final training at the military academy, they put me through qualification for the infantry even though I’d been told they have drone courses. In fact, they don’t. So it’s been disappointment after disappointment; lots of lies, just so people don’t run away from each stage of the process. This feeling of being misled so many times is pretty devastating.”
Like many Ukrainians, Yan held an officer’s rank from doing basic military training at university, but he had no army experience and worked in event management and video editing before the war.
“On one side it feels unfair, but on the other side you have to try and make peace with your situation,” he says of the shock of conscription. “It’s depressing, but at some point you have to build another mentality, the mentality of an army person. It feels like civilian life is waving goodbye.”
Yan’s experience as a drone engineer and occasional drone pilot has given him skills that Ukraine needs, as its expanding unmanned systems forces seek 15,000 new recruits.
Yet he was assigned to a mechanised infantry course at officer training academy in western Ukraine, learning how to command a platoon armed with machine guns, grenade launchers and infantry fighting vehicles, and perform tasks ranging from laying minefields to filing the mounds of paperwork that the military still generates.
“I was trying to get onto a drone course or straight into the brigade to which we’d been supplying drones. They sent recommendation letters for me, but nothing worked because the [conscription] system just wants to take you in and put you through,” Yan says.
“They need, for example, to put 200 people a month through the academy because they have requests from brigades for 200 junior officers, and the numbers must correspond. They don’t really care who goes where ... and they don’t really look at personal data, to see where a person would work best or where would be the best fit.”
Volunteers poured into Ukraine’s military at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, but numbers dwindled as the war became a battle of attrition, with Russia’s larger forces slowly but relentlessly grinding forward in the east.
Recruiting and retaining new soldiers has become a critical issue for Ukraine: between January 2022 and October 2025, the national authorities registered more than 310,000 criminal cases of soldiers going absent without leave (AWOL) or deserting from their unit – with nearly half of those coming this year.
Analysts say the real picture is not quite as bad as data suggests, because one soldier who repeatedly goes AWOL can rack up several cases, and the system does not always account for soldiers who return to service with their original unit, or by going into the reserve, or by fleeing one unit and rejoining the army in another.
Yan took the last option after failing to secure deployment to his requested brigade after completing training last month.
As junior officers with a university education and no army experience, Yan’s cohort had expected to be given jobs in military administration – but in fact many were quickly sent to the combat zone in infantry and assault units: “They fooled us at the training centre too ... no one knew where we were being sent until the last second.”
After being taken from training to his assigned brigade last month, Yan immediately went AWOL, “changing mobile numbers, paying taxis with cash, changing my military clothes to newly bought [clothes] in a mall and hiding in a cinema,” he says.
Friends helped him get a lift on a cargo truck 1,000km across Ukraine to Zaporizhzhia region, where the unit he had always intended to join was expecting him; he has found his new comrades to be “very welcoming,” with “no judgment, full understanding.”
Yan is now about 30km from the so-called grey zone that separates the warring armies, and expects to work with drones when confirmation of his transfer comes through.
There is no optimism near the front line about US efforts to bring Russia to the negotiating table: “It’s about their ... business [deals] and Ukraine’s withdrawal [from territory], no real peace deal, unfortunately.”
Now a military man who could face years at war, Yan brushes off any concern that going AWOL might bring trouble down the line.
“I tried all the legal ways before ... That’s how transfers are made now,” he says. “And trouble is better than being another corpse in the grey zone.”
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