The war has entered its fifth year. On the intensification of street guerrilla in Ukraine

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For nearly 1,500 days and nights, the shadow of death has swirled over our Slobozhanshchina, and the sickle of warfare has reaped the harvest of life. Despite the predictions of the front's collapse last year—some with fear, others with hope that everyone would finally be able to leave—it still stands near Volchansk, Chasov Yar, Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), and Gulyaipole. The deadline for a hypothetical agreement has been pushed back again to late spring. No threats of sanctions against the Kiev authorities from the Trump’s fascist administration, which proudly admits to raping children if it was "a very good deal that will help them become great." The UN is also in no hurry to install a temporary administration under its auspices in Ukraine, modeled on East Timor. The drowning one's salvation remains his own doing.

Broad resistance to drafting in Ukraine we recently compared to the resistance to ICE in previous article "From Minneapolis to Ukraine, only street countering can stop the state-run hunt for people". The problem is that, as in the United States, it is not strong enough to change the overall situation. After the complete devastation of our revolutionary field by Stalinism, the tradition of mass street movements disappeared in Ukraine, except in support of some right-wing politicians: 1991, 2004, 2014... Rebuilding it from scratch takes a lot of time and has been underway for two years now, since the law tightening mobilization was adopted on April 11, 2024.

However, since late 2025, we see a new trend: people against the war are moving from self-defense to counter-strike. Almost every day there are news reports of armed attacks against police or enlistment groups, mostly in rear regions like Odessa or West Ukraine. This is no longer like today's United States, but rather like during the Vietnam War!

In particular, on the first morning of February, a passerby in Vinnytsia fired several shots at a territorial recruitment center’s group and fled. No one was injured, and on February 4, the suspect, a local man, was detained. On the morning of February 2, a 44-year-old Lviv resident witnessed the mobilization process, pulled out a traumatic pistol, and began banging the weapon on the window of a minibus carrying TRC and police. When the vehicle pulled away, the woman shot at it. She was served with a notice of suspicion of hooliganism. (See the title image.) On February 4, near Mechnikov Street in Odessa, while TRC and police cops were conducting a raid, a man they were attempting to mobilize used tear gas and stabbed a TRC serviceman before fleeing, according to the press service. On February 7, the police press service reported that in Kharkov's district of Saltovka, a 31-year-old guy stabbed two TRC agents during an identity check, inflicting non-penetrating knife wounds to the head and torso after attempting to escape. They received non-penetrating cuts to the head and torso, the suspect was also detained. On February 14, a similar incident took place near the Music Commandery in Odessa: an enlistment group stopped a citizen for an identity check, he responded by pulling a knife and stabbing one of them. While his colleagues were rendering aid, the passer-by escaped. On January 16, on Brigade Street in Odessa, TRC servicemen and police stopped a car and discovered that the 49-year-old driver had been wanted since September 2025. During a conversation, the man opened fire with a traumatic pistol. Two employees were wounded: one in the chest, the other in the inner right thigh. A window of the service vehicle was also damaged. The driver was detained.

Left: "Beat the enemy with all available means!" (in Ukrainian). Right: "Odessa, rise up!" (in Russian)

On February 23, in the town of Kozyatyn in the Vinnytsia region, eyewitnesses reported that a man was beaten during mobilization, and when passersby attempted to free him, police fired several shots. Another man was detained for attempting to take a gun from a patrol officer. At the same time, in Odessa, people caught and detained a TRC employee who was abandoned by colleagues from a minibus. The next day in Lutsk, a man fired several shots at a warning group, but did not hit anyone. The shooter was detained and his weapon taken away. Also on February 24, in the city of Krivoy Rog, one TRC serviceman was stabbed into a leg when caring people came to help a passerby they had stopped who was wanted for evading mobilization. The stabber turned out to be a guy whose father was hit by them very hard in the face (until he lost consciousness) and had his collarbone broken. During this he shouted: "Don’t touch my father, he’s sick!" The elderly man was hospitalized.

In some western regions, armed clashes are also already occurring in series. On February 6, in the city of Rivne, two civilian vehicles blocked a van carrying mobilized soldiers and helped them escape. The local TRC confirmed the incident and that one of their employees was injured as a result of this attack. On January 30, some 30-year-old military man reported to the Rivne region’s police that his Fiat Doblo, parked on the training ground's territory, had been stolen. On the same day, cops found the stolen car near Rivne. It was later revealed that the suspected car thief was a 49-year-old local resident who had been mobilized in January of this year. When police arrived at his home on February 14, the suspect opened fire from a window. After a series of shots, he emerged with his hands raised and was captured. No one was injured.

On February 18 in the Dnepropetrovsk region, a local resident was sentenced to seven years in prison for stabbing a TRC employee in May 2024 in Sinelnikovo. According to the accusation, hewas sitting in the back passenger seat and tried to stab one in the neck. However, he was stopped, and the blow struck his collarbone and wrist. But the accused denied this: "He admits that he inflicted minor injuries when his knife was taken away. He did not have the strength to endure it. Those persons inflicted bodily injuries on him and violated their duties. He believes that he is not guilty. He worked as a security guard at Interpipe and was not held criminally liable." The term of serving the sentence is counted from the moment of detention.

On February 19, some shooting into the air occured in the village of Mamalyga in the Chernivtsi region. A special police unit was detaining a fugitive military man; while he was being transported to the police station, "a group of unidentified individuals began blocking the service vehicle and actively resisting law enforcement." No one in the group was injured. That same day, in the town of Storozhinets in this region, two cops were injured by a grenade thrown into their service car after arriving at the conflict. The 31-year-old driver was slightly injured, and his 23-year-old colleague was put into a medically induced coma with a severe mine blast head injury: a fragment entered the cranial cavity. The arrested person was a drunk 48-year-old resident of Storozhynets, a military veteran who was discharged from the army in 2023 due to health reasons.

On March 6, an enlistment patrol in Dnieper (Dnipro) stopped two men for an identity check. During the conversation, the 58-year-old local resident "unexpectedly pulled out a knife" and stabbed the 24-year-old TRC serviceman in the thigh. The man was detained at the scene and charged with assault against a public official.

On March 8, near the village of Ozero in Volyn, approximately seven civilian cars caught up with a TRC service vehicle, began maneuvering dangerously, and cut it off. As a result, the kidnappers crashed into a ditch. The pursuers used physical force against them, broke the window, and freed the Zaporozhye city resident they were transporting. One of the man-catchers suffered a head injury, and another suffered abrasions to his forearm and face due to a broken passenger window. The brave guys filmed this GTA themselves. The following day, in the Kalush district of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, two district TRC employees suffered cut wounds: one to the neck, the other to the arm and shoulder. They were attempting to check the documents of a passerby, who ran away and used a knife after being captured, then he escaped. The wounded were hospitalized. On March 10, once again in Western Ukraine, a video emerged of Roma attacking the TRC. A conflict between Roma and enlistment group reportedly broke out during its attempt to mobilize one man in a village of the Uzhhorod district in Transcarpathia. As the footage shows, the crowd began attacking the military with sticks and smashed the windows of a Volkswagen van. During the clash, they also attempted to pull out one of the TRC representatives. Police managed to calm the protesters on the spot; three guys were detained and taken to the police station. "Near the scene of the incident is one of the largest camps in Transcarpathia. In that camp and nearby, they try not to mobilize Gypsies (Roma). Because it is dangerous for ordinary police-TRC crews," noted local military blogger Ivan Beletsky. On March 13, in the Poltava region, up to 20 people attacked an enlistment group and police near the village of Nyzhni Mlyny. As a result of the tear gas attack, three military servicemen and three policemen suffered chemical burns. After additional police crews arrived, eight people were detained, six of whom were subject to mobilization and sent for medical examination…

On March 16, in the village of Stefanovka in annexed Crimea, a resident resisted arrest and opened fire on police crew with a rifle, according to the Investigative Committee and the prosecutor's office. As a result, four Russian cops were injured, including the deputy head of the district criminal investigation department. The shooter then used a Molotov cocktail to set his car on fire and attempted to burn down the house. He was wounded by return fire, the regional Ministry of Internal Affairs reported. They added that police were planning to confiscate illegally possessed weapons and explosives.

The following photos were posted from the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. According to the city chairman Ruslan Martsinkiv, waste collection was stopped in various areas of the city on March 8-9 because the company with 85 persons on staff ran out of reservations from drafting. "During the re-reserving, some workers did not show up. These problems, especially on Dontsov Street, were resolved overnight. Waste collection will be much better in the areas where there were complaints," said him on March 10.

On March 12, our news outlet joined the spontaneous campaign for boycott of Monobank after its CEO, Oleg Gorokhovsky, publicly bullied a girl from Kharkov living in Germany for allegedly displaying a Russian flag on her wall during a video verification. (She calls this flag Slovenian, and states that she loves Ukraine.) We also reminded the audience that this banker had previously called to donate him for nuclear weapons for Ukraine and that the company treats its employees the same as its clients. Two days later, our material was already topping the Google search results for the query "Boycott Monobank":

On March 12 in Lviv, some military serviceman blocked the movement of a TRC minibus, fired into the air and through the windshield, and then, at gunpoint, forced the kidnappers to release his brother. The court remanded him in custody without bail until May 10. The incident was reported by Lviv Media, official press services did not comment. On March 16 in Zaporozhye, the patrol police responded to a call about a beating and attempted robbery. At the scene, two military servicemen attacked a policeman. According to official press release, one of the attackers pulled out an object similar to a pistol and behaved aggressively. The cop shot him dead. Another man was trying to use pepper spray against them, he was injured. Both attackers were in the status of SZCh. Another similar story occurred some earlier: on December 25, news came from Dnieper (Dnipro) that some kidnapped by the TRC was allegedly killed by them while trying to resist. His name is Sergei Loktionov, and he's actually alive. He was stopped on the street and, without even checking his documents, was forced into a minibus. There, he stabbed one of the TRC employees, who opened fire, wounding another enlistment agent who was used by the self-defender as cover. Thus, two attackers were injured at once. Now Sergei is in pre-trial detention. At the end of February, his detention was extended for two months. This is him:

On March 17, during a document check in Nikolaev, a 33-year-old man wanted for violating military registration rules inflicted non-penetrating knife wounds to the abdomen and leg of a cop and a TRC serviceman. The suspect was detained and faces 9 to 15 years in prison or life imprisonment. Two days later, in Slavyansk, in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donetsk region, a police captain was shot dead while checking papers. It was 41-year-old senior community officer Oleg Zakharenko. A local resident, 51-year-old Yuriy Dmitryuk, reportedly a military man in AWOL born in 1974, then was detained and suspected of the murder and disappearance with the officer’s weapon. He was previously convicted for causing grievous bodily harm resulting in the death of the victim and for the theft of a mobile phone.

Both the murdered and the suspect were natives of Slavyansk. Low-intensity civil war as it is

About a week ago, in Olexandriia of the Kirovohrad region, some local volunteer sat in his car for 28 hours to avoid contact with TRC. On the morning of March 18, he was running away from these honorable guys, however his car was stopped near the garages. Eventually, a crowd of locals came to free him, and the bounty hunters left the blocked one. March 25, one of the garage cooperatives in Ternopil: a "summoning group" discovered two men on the premises. When asked to show papers, one of them threatened the visitors with an axe and threw two Molotov cocktails toward a TRC vehicle, setting one bottle on fire. He then locked himself in the garage and came out after negotiating with the police. The suspect, a resident of Ternopil, born in 1969, was wanted for violating military registration rules:

That same evening, during a document check in Odessa, patrol cops received a burst of automatic fire from a car. Two of the wounded are currently in critical condition. Later, 45-year-old Odessa resident Igor P. was found in an unfinished building in the village of Svetloe. According to a police report, he refused to engage the negotiator and opened fire on the special unit from the third floor. The shooter was killed by return fire. He was reportedly born in 1980, worked as a driver, and had no criminal record but was wanted as a draft dodger:

Another emerging trend seems to be prosecuting people not for acts of personal self-defense, but for participating in collective riots. On January 22, the Ovidiopol District Court in the region of Odessa convicted a participant in the TRC minibus smashing at the 7th Kilometer industrial market on the morning of October 30. For inflicting multiple soft tissue bruises on one of the uninvited guests with "an object resembling a fragment of a car muffler," he received a five-year prison sentence with a three-year probationary period. On January 29, the same court sentenced an Odessa entrepreneur who stepped onto the road with her hands raised, lay on the hood of a Volkswagen Transporter T5, and thereby stopped an entire convoy of three vehicles. She also received a five-year prison sentence with a three-year probationary period. The Security Service of Ukraine is holding another suspect in custody awaiting sentencing on charges of hitting the same TRC employee and their van with a telescopic metal baton; at least several other attackers have not been identified. On February 2, the Kyiv District Court of Kharkov handed down a verdict in the case of a skirmish in the Barabashovo metro station, where a man detained for evading conscription was helped to escape. A woman, from a group of people who approached, grabbed the clothes and pushed four policemen: a sergeant, a senior sergeant, a senior lieutenant, and a captain! Under a plea bargain with the prosecutor, she was fined 17,000 hryvnias.

Anyway, the main form of resistance to the war is absence without leave (SZCh). It does not require broad organization and is much less likely to lead to punishment than street action. On January 26, one of the most famous Ukrainian war profiteers and propagandists, Alina "Mercedes" Mykhailova, admitted that most of the mobilized per month run away: "There is no one left to put in these trenches, in these dugouts, and especially no one to hold this line of defense. This is the main problem of 2025, in my opinion. You can look at the number of SZCh last month, I do not want to announce these numbers, but they are available to everyone. If you look at how many people were mobilized per month, 70% of them went to SZCh. We have 10 thousand of those who—crooked, oblique—at least somehow reach basic combined-arms training, and those who did not manage to simply escape behind the fence. Therefore, this number will increase, and it will continue to be even worse."

Why do others continue to defend their prison? For the same reasons some civilians support the war: Stockholm syndrome (you may have seen this a lot among the anarchists), a naive belief in the promises of some career other than assaults, the everyday habit of obeying any authority... Inna from Zaporozhye, on February 14, showed how this works, by the example of Kharkov agrobusinessman Vsevolod Kozhemyako's stormtroopers:

"My son was planning a trip [abroad] in the spring, but it did not work out. In early January, the TRC took him by the arms and legs like a dog. He spent two weeks in the region, and on January 26, they transported him to Kiev. He started acting like a zombie, saying, 'Everything's fine, they won't send us to zero.' I don't understand what's wrong with him. He's in Khartiia. He don't tell me his unit number or the commander's name... Before, it was just home and work; he was going crazy, and now it's 'communication.' Everyone's called 'brothers,' but in reality, every third one is a snitch. I don't know what to do... Especially since Syrskyi is preparing a counteroffensive, saying we won't achieve anything on the defensive. Now he's in the woods near Kiev, in training camp. He agreed with a friend about transferring to the anti-aircraft missile forces, I don't know if it will work out or not. At first, everything was fine. A riot is already starting, does anyone know the hotline number?? I need to voice my complaints. There's no toilet paper, internet access is limited to 20 minutes twice a week, they're not allowing parcels, they won't do minimal purchases at personal request... and so on. I haven't received a penny of money yet, and it's 600 km from home. I think he's smart enough to come out at a more opportune moment, everything has its time."

An anonymous IT specialist from Kamenskoye (Dneprodzerzhinsk) comments on this story after escape and crossing the Ukrainian border last year:

"They promise everyone the moon and the stars there... And many, many people fall for it. 'Just don't go into SZCh and complete basic military training, and then we'll definitely take you back, you'll be with us at headquarters.'
And there he is, at the stage where everything is okay, a promising career, they won't send you to zero [the front line], yeah, yeah... But just try finding these promises in the operational command orders or even in the commander's staff list... and there it's a completely different picture...
I've been through all this too and seen it with my own eyes. Don't be surprised by his words now.
Most of the busified and formidable evaders naively believe everything and begin to serve their commanders... And many even join the rapid reaction groups – these are detachments that hunt down those who flee their units.
In time, he’ll realize he's been deceived... Some realize it in time, some when it's too late... but they'll send everyone.
Then he'll start hearing from his own comrades-in-arms in his battalion, in his brigade... Over time, he'll begin to understand everything that awaits him... The only question is whether he'll understand in time or when it's too late to change anything...
In my company at basic military training, out of 140 people, 100% were busified. We lived in the same gym with the TRC. There were about 40 of our people/beds, and next to us were 15 TRC beds. And everyone ate at the same table, and no one barked at anyone. This is Western Ukraine. Late winter 2025. Two people were genuinely against mobilization and ready to run from the first day. The rest all bought into the 'you won't be sent to zero' tactic. But there were still bars on the windows and at the entrance for some reason. In each tent, there were 4-5 people who agreed to join the rapid reaction group (those who catch escapees). They were given a jeep, two drones each, and night vision goggles. And they kept watch at night to make sure no one escaped... That is, they were hunting down their own, just like the TRCs, essentially... I couldn't believe it myself... But that's how they brainwash you...
It only dawned on them that they were being deceived when news started coming in from their own comrades. And that's when they realized what was really going to happen next... That's when everyone flocked to the SZCh massively...
So there are still plenty of naive people... 'They don't send anyone to zero... you'll be putting up antennas in communications, maybe 40 km from the front line at most... you won't get any closer, I'm telling you, bro.' And the fact that you're a grenade launcher on the payroll — 'That's just temporary... don't pay any attention, we'll replace you later.' And that's how everyone believes it. A sweet lie is better than the bitter truth. And now you probably won't be able to prove anything to him... I'd guess he's already got a good rear position and the romance of the army in his head... adventures, etc., etc. Everything there’s skillfully thought out there...
Military science is thousands of years old. And there are many ways to persuade a person to go to his death..."

While financial and economic problems are approaching record highs during the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, the eternally legitimate leader remains unwilling to compromise on the peace agreement terms. The EU is developing a new financing mechanism that will allocate €30 billion, bypassing the position of the Hungarian and Slovak authorities. Our autumn forecast has been almost entirely confirmed: peace talks were initially reduced to mere semblance due to the treadmill of foot-dragging, and then even this foot-dragging ran out of steam. Apparently, the official Kiev is assuming that the Middle East warfare will soon end, oil prices will fall again, sanctions against Russia will be reinstated, and American air defense missiles will continue to be supplied. Or, conversely, that US and Israeli aggression against Iran will escalate to the point that they will need services of the private military country much more than now and that it will be able to receive financial support already for this purpose. If these expectations fail, a choice will arise: either agree to a swift end to the war in accordance with the Alaska terms, or continue it in a much worse situation, with increased militarization of all spheres of life and the "tie of freedom" around the population's neck. €30 or even €90 billion—not the €140 billion initially planned to allocate. This will only prolong the agony of this invincible madhouse, the beginning of which we acknowledged back two years ago, when the busification bill was just being prepared for adoption.