Women in Ukraine have increasingly come to occupy a central position in resisting coercive mobilisation, what is colloquially referred to in Ukraine as "busification", from бус ("van"), a term derived from the vans into which military-age men are forcibly bundled in public spaces.
Because the overwhelming majority of women are not subject to compulsory military service, they are also disproportionately the people who actually witness what is happening. They do not live under quite the same omnipresent threat of being stopped, hauled away, or forcibly bundled into a vehicle at random while simply going about their daily lives. That relative freedom of movement has, in practice, produced a peculiar gendering of public space, with streets, squares, public transport, shops, and all the other spaces of civilian life becoming overwhelmingly female domains (aside from the occasional male pensioner on his way to yet another medical appointment or the relatively carefree male student who has not yet reached mobilisation age). As a result, women are often among the first people to witness these incidents and, importantly, among those actually in a position to confront them (see, for example, this video).
A woman on her knees, pleading with draft officers not to mobilise her husband and send him to war. Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk oblast (Havryshko, 2026).
This is discussed in considerably more detail in an article by Ukrainian scholar Marta Havryshko. The topic itself remains conspicuously underexamined in Western discourse (see, below, the link to the recent case of a Swedish journalist in Kyiv who *accidentally* captured an act of forced mobilisation unfolding in the background of his own footage, filmed with such understated casualness, the expensive shirt, the whole thing, that it becomes a somewhat perfect allegory, you know). And when the issue does surface, it gets subjected to censorship, as happened recently when one of the European universities cancelled a scholarly conference panel dealing with coercive mobilisation.
Surely this is because the reality of coercive mobilisation sits in such stark contradiction to the carefully cultivated post-2022 narrative of Ukrainian resilience and the supposedly inexhaustible willingness of people in Ukraine to endure Russia’s increasingly destructive, for people in Ukraine, invasion "for as long as it takes".
Ukraine under Western eyes: as a stand-in and projection screen for our own inherent supremacy and our pathetic need for affirmation. It doesn’t matter that, until about five minutes before February 24, 2022, most of the West was far from certain that Ukraine was like us, let alone part of us.
Ukraine is our magic mirror: an ageing queen, our hearts eaten by doubt and our features held together with fillers, we ask it to affirm that we’re still the most beautiful of all. In this version of the tale, the mirror reflects only what we want to see and pays the highest price for its service (Rochowanski, 2026).
