According to a decree issued by Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, mandatory military conscription begins on 1 April in Mariupol and the surrounding region.
The decree requires every man between eighteen and thirty to report to the military registration and enlistment office for service in the armed forces under russian control, and local police have reportedly been instructed to deliver conscripts at any cost, which opens the door to abuses of power that need no imagination to picture. For anyone who has been waiting for a chance to get out of the occupied territory, this closes it, and the most alarming detail is that conscripts are now reportedly forbidden to leave Donetsk region even for russia, so the trap has been shut from both sides.
Since 2014, in Crimea and the Donbas and the Luhansk region, russia’s occupation has followed one consistent strategy of setting Ukrainians against Ukrainians and forcing them to fight on behalf of the power occupying them. Conscripting local men into its own armed forces creates divisions inside communities, spreads terror through them, and brings death to the very places russia claims to be protecting. If russia ever extended this war into European countries, the same method would be used there, with Ukrainians sent to fight Europeans and the collective West, since sowing discord and exploiting the local population serves russian geopolitical ambition while it undermines the unity of whatever region is targeted.
Under occupation, Ukrainian men are left with choices that are not really choices at all. Put yourself in that position for a moment. Would you resist, risking your own life and the lives of the people you love, or would you submit to the occupying power and become complicit in what it does?
The men facing this include Ukrainian evangelicals, among them church ministers and some theological educators, who chose to stay in their communities after 2014 out of a deep commitment to serve their neighbours and to keep a Christian presence in the middle of the turmoil. Conscription now confronts them with an agonising decision: to take part in a full-scale war that contradicts everything they believe and harms their own countrymen, or to refuse and face severe consequences for themselves and for their families.
What would you do? What would Jesus do? And where are the WWJD preachers today, since we urgently need them here on the front lines in Ukraine to show us by their deeds rather than their words? We need all those healers who sell television programmes and claim to have healed hundreds and thousands of people. We need them urgently, in our hospitals and our refugee hubs, healing wounded soldiers and civilians. We would pay for the healing if it worked, and we would cover their travel costs as well.
How long, O Lord?
Taras D, Ukraine
764 days of the full-scale russian war against Ukraine
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