Anton was walking home with a friend in Kyiv when he was suddenly seized and forced into the back seat of a police car, with an officer on each side, heading towards a future that would likely see him in the trenches.

The 52-year-old, who requested to withhold his surname to protect his identity, has supported Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but did not want to be sent to the front line. The grinding attrition of war seemed like a death sentence given his health issues. He is HIV-positive and has arthritis and poor eyesight – conditions that he believed made him medically unfit to serve.

But since mobilisation laws took effect in May 2024, Ukraine’s recruitment officers have been ambushing men on the street.

In late January, when he was allegedly captured, he had been avoiding venturing out of his apartment block – fearful of both Ukraine’s controversial conscription drive and Russian drone attacks on his neighbourhood.

But on one of the few times he did leave his home, the police jumped out of a car that was parked in a residential garage and chased him, he said.

He was then caught and driven to a militarised section of a state clinic in Kyiv, where his phone was confiscated.

“They told me to mute my phone and hand it over,” he said. “I started to protest. The guard said, ‘Don’t push me to use physical methods on you. Give it to me now.’ So I did.”

After undergoing medical tests, he was transferred to a military recruitment centre on the outskirts of the city, where he would spend two days in a room with barred windows, a bucket of cold pasta, and no way to contact the outside world.

What happened to Anton has a term in Ukraine – “busification” – men stopped on city streets, checked for exemption cards, and placed directly onto buses bound for mobilisation centres.