A riot erupted Monday night outside a residential house in Ukraine’s Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, a suburb approximately 12 miles west of Kyiv, after social media posts claimed the military was torturing conscripts in the basement and that medics were being denied access to the wounded.
Approximately 200 people gathered at the house. They threw eggs, water bottles, and bricks at police and National Guard soldiers. After they broke through the brick wall surrounding the house, they were dispersed with tear gas and live ammunition warning shots.
A statement released that night from the 1st Corps of the National Guard of Ukraine
confirmed that the house was a “military camp” operating as a “temporary deployment point of military unit 3121 of the National Guard of Ukraine, which belongs to the 1st corps of the Azov National Guard.”
The statement said the camp was holding “mobilized servicemen” who had been “detained after committing an unauthorized abandonment of the unit…awaiting distribution to military units and further service.” It said four of the detainees had “injuries” and dismissed the torture allegations as “unverified information.”
“Azov protects the lives and health of its servicemen in extremely difficult conditions at the front. The unit is guided by the same principles in the rear: this applies to all servicemen of the corps and does not depend on the length of their service, ” the statement said.
The Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, out of his Patriot of Ukraine gang and fellow travelers from Right Sector, the coalition Nazi militia that had played a pivotal role in the 2014 Maidan coup. Since then, Azov has evolved into two sections, “The Third Army Corps,” which Biletsky leads, and “The 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov” within the National Guard.
Both National Guard commander Oleksandr Pivnenko and Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov arrived at the scene to restore order and assure protesters that the allegations were false and that the four injured detainees had been taken to a medical center.
Ukrainian officials suggested an influence campaign might be at work, but admitted the reality of the deeply controversial mobilization tactics makes such potential campaigns easy to run.
As The Kyiv Independent put it, “While the events in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka show signs of a Russian information operation, their escalation is built on real, simmering tensions in Ukrainian society around the topic of mobilization.”
Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia’s “full-scale invasion” of 2022, which authorized forced mobilization. Draft officers have resorted to ripping military-aged men off the street and throwing them in vans or buses as a standard recruitment practice. Hundreds of draft officers have been attacked, and a few have been killed.
