Conscription in Occupied Lands: Russia’s War Crime
Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are documenting and securing convictions against organisers of the illegal draft.
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As Russia steps up its efforts to boost the ranks of its armed forces, Ukraine continues to investigate and prosecute those responsible for conscripting residents of occupied territories into the Russian army.
The Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War prohibits the recruitment of people from occupied territories into the army.
However, according to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, this “direct violation of human rights and the norms of international humanitarian law” has become commonplace in the occupied territories.
“We are witnessing Russia systematically repeating practices already condemned as war crimes by international tribunals,” Lubinets said.
Immediately after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the occupation of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Russian authorities began to systematically conscript Ukrainian men into their army.
Men living on the peninsula were drafted into the Russian armed forces, while those from the eastern regions were conscripted into units of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), which were controlled by Russian security structures.
“Since the full-scale invasion, it has established 'military commissariats' in the temporarily occupied territories, forced men to join occupational armed formations and used mobilisation as a method of control and assimilation of the population,” Lubinets explained.
The conscription of men from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions was formalised in 2024 when all occupied Ukrainian regions were incorporated into Russia’s Southern Military District. Residents were required to obtain Russian passports, with men aged 18 to 30 issued draft notices for compulsory service.
While military recruitment has traditionally occurred in autumn and spring campaigns, a decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 29, 2025, will make conscription a year-round process starting in 2026.
“This is not a draft at all, all these events should be called a mobilisation. And it has been ongoing since the fall of 2022. The mobilisation is simply changing its form,” Ivan Chuvilyaev, a representative of the Russian anti-war movement Idite Lesom (Hide in the Forest), told IWPR. “At one point, they were throwing money around to lure people with financial problems. At another point, they decided to concentrate on convicts and people in pre-trial detention. Now, they’ve decided to concentrate on conscripts.”
Idite Lesom volunteers help men evade military service in the Russian army or desert to avoid fighting in the war against Ukraine.
Chuvilyaev explained that, during the draft, new recruits were often forced to sign contracts which allow them to be sent to Ukraine. This approach is also applied to men from the occupied territories, even if they now live elsewhere.
“They are drafted in Moscow, St Petersburg, anywhere. They already have a Russian passport, some new registration, a residence permit,” he continued. “There have been cases where a man from Donetsk was forced into compulsory service and coerced into signing a contract in Kaliningrad, Belgorod or somewhere else.”
Russia plans to draft 261,000 men into its armed forces. The number to be conscripted from the occupied territories of Ukraine has not been disclosed.
According to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Russia has conscripted 46,327 men from the occupied Ukrainian territories into its army since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Dmytro Usov, the secretary of the Coordination Headquarters, said that a significant number of these conscripts were sent to fight against Ukrainian defence forces as part of Russia’s occupying army. According to the Coordination Headquarters, one in six Russian prisoners of war currently held in Ukrainian camps is a Ukrainian citizen.
Criminal Proceedings
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 26 criminal offences related to the forced mobilisation of citizens in Ukraine’s occupied territories have been registered, the prosecutor general’s office of Ukraine told IWPR.
“In these criminal proceedings, 22 individuals have been served with notices of suspicion. Indictments against 14 people have been sent to court and two convictions have been handed down,” a spokesperson said.
One of the convictions concerns Aleksandr Kabashnyi, the de facto Russian military commissar for the city of Feodosia and the Kirovskyi district of Crimea, who the Darnytskyi District Court of Kyiv sentenced to eight years in prison in April 2023 for signing conscription notices for civilian residents of the peninsula. As the military commissar was in occupied territory, the trial was held in absentia. In 2024, the case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the verdict.
The prosecutor’s office for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, which acted as the prosecution, told IWPR that “this Supreme Court ruling, based on materials from our office, is one of the first two decisions to establish a positive legal precedent in cases concerning the crime under Part 1 of Article 438 of the criminal code of Ukraine regarding the illegal forced conscription of the civilian population in occupied territories into the armed forces of the occupying state”.
The other verdict also concerns a Russian military commissar from occupied Crimea, Konstantin Kacharov. At the time of the crime, he was the military commissar for the Simferopol district and the city of Alushta. The court proved that Kacharov developed plans and organised five conscription campaigns, thereby forcing the civilian population of the peninsula to serve in the Russian army. For this, he was sentenced in absentia to 11 years in prison on January 30, 2023. This was the first verdict in Ukraine on such charges.
The main obstacle in investigating these cases is the lack of access to occupied territories, which hinders the speed of the investigation and makes it virtually impossible to conduct on-the-ground inquiries.
“Another challenge is the difficulty in obtaining evidence of the criminal offences, as most witnesses and victims reside permanently in the temporarily occupied territory of Crimea and do not travel to mainland Ukraine,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
These proceedings are held in the absence of the accused and verdicts state that the convicted will begin serving their sentences from the moment they are detained.
“A person who committed a war crime and was convicted may at some point be captured by Ukraine and will immediately begin to serve their sentence,” Onysiia Syniuk, head of the analytical department at the ZMINA Human Rights Centre, told IWPR. “Or this person might leave Russia for another country and could be detained and extradited to Ukraine to serve their sentence. Such verdicts can also have a deterrent effect, so that people know that they will be held accountable.”
Russian authorities dismiss all accusations, describing conscription in the occupied territories as a standard process under their own legislation.
However, Syniuk argued that the investigation of these crimes were of great importance and could help bring to justice not only commissars but also the military and political leadership of Russia.
“In the mobilisation process, the commissars do not act on their own initiative or beliefs; they are implementing Russia’s state policy, which is handed down from the highest political circles,” she said. “Ultimately, the decrees announcing conscription in the occupied territories are signed personally by the President of Russia. These cases can become the context needed to prove the guilt of the highest political leadership.”
