In front of an army recruitment center, located in a suburb of Odessa, the large port city in southern Ukraine, the cars parked in double lines and the regular parade of people attest to the activity of the place. Without being overloaded, it manages a continuous flow of visitors. Among them, Anton, 38 years old, cap on his head, in a t-shirt and shorts, explains to the armed guard at the entrance that he is indeed a student and can therefore, as such, avoid being sent to the forehead. In his hand he holds the precious sesame stamped by his university where he says he is enrolled in adult education.
Behind him, with a closed and worried face, a 17-year-old holds out the same document. He too was summoned after being intercepted in a street in Odessa by a patrol of recruiters who, every day, hunt for conscription jumpers which targets all men of fighting age, i.e. between 18 years and 60 years – unless they are exempt for reasons established by law, including that of pursuing university studies.
A few meters away, about to join them, Vadim, 20 years old, in the first year of medicine, assures, for his part, that in his faculty “all students must take this step and it must be repeated every year”.
The Ukrainian authorities believe, in fact, that they cannot afford the luxury of depriving themselves of available men. They lack soldiers in the face of the incomparable human reservoir that Russia has. According to the Odessa regional military administration, all volunteers were already integrated into the army by the summer of 2022. Since then, thanks to conscription and the establishment of a policy of systematic summons for suspected cases, the country was able to train nearly ten brigades in one year. Since then, fake students have also been among the main targets of recruiters.
Dacha, 18, wearing a t-shirt and skirt as black as her eyes and her platform shoes, does not hesitate, in front of the austere facade of her economics university, to say that her boyfriend, Bogdan, aged 22 years old, escaped the war thanks to this subterfuge. “He was a technician, during the fourth wave of mobilization, we were worried and he registered, in August, for a three-year training course in catering, that made me sad, because that we had to find 25,000 hryvnias [640 euros] for registration fees, even though he no longer has a salary. »
“Students who voluntarily went to the front”
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