Cars double-parked and a steady queue of people in front of an army recruitment center on the outskirts of Odesa, southern Ukraine, testified to a busy hub, which without being overcrowded handles a continuous flow of people. Anton, 38, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and a cap on his head, was among them and was telling the armed guard at the entrance that he was a bona fide student, which exempted him from being sent to the front. He held the proof in his hand, the precious student card stamped by his university showing he was enrolled in an adult education course

Behind Anton, a 17-year-old, his face tight with anxiety, held out the same document. He had also been summonsed after being intercepted in a street of Odesa by military recruiters who patrol daily for draft dodgers from a conscription scheme that targets all men of fighting age – between 18 and 60 – unless exempted for reasons specified by law, including university studies.

A few yards away, 20-year-old Vadim had almost caught up with them. He was a first-year medical student and said that in his university "every student has to follow this procedure, which has to be renewed every year."

For Ukrainian authorities, Ukraine needs to recruit all able men for active service. The country is short of soldiers, unlike Russia which has an inexhaustible supply from its human reservoir. According to Odesa's regional military administration, all volunteers had already joined the army by summer 2022. With the conscription that followed and the implementation of a policy of systematically calling up reluctant recruits, the country has been able to train almost a dozen brigades in a year. Bogus students have been among the main targets for military recruiters.

Standing in front of the austere façade of the university for economics, 18-year-old Dasha, in wedge-heeled shoes and clad in a T-shirt and skirt as black as her eyes, had no qualms about telling us that her boyfriend Bogdan, 22, dodged the war thanks to this subterfuge. "He was working as a technician, during the fourth mobilization wave. We were worried; so in August, he enrolled for a three-year training course in catering, which upset me because we had to find 25,000 hryvnias [€650] for the registration fees, even though he no longer has a salary."

'Students have gone voluntarily to the front'

As a measure of their anxiety, young people who risk being conscripted have created a Telegram channel set up to alert to the whereabouts of recruiting patrols who scour the city on foot or in vehicles, and by September 25 it had 195,464 subscribers. In this way, potential recruits who have still eluded the authorities can avoid coming face to face with "the olives," the male and female recruiters nicknamed for the color of their military uniforms. They have been filmed and photographed without their knowledge and can be seen, day and night, intercepting people of military age. Sometimes, they stop a bus and check all the male passengers on board.

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