by Gregor Spitzen
[REGNUM] Videos of forced mobilization (or “busification” or “mogilization”) have been regularly appearing on social media and news reports from Ukraine for a long time, at least since mid-2023. How do Europeans react to them?
I haven't posted videos or news about press gangs since they began two years ago because it is simply Ukraine fighting total war against Russia; it was unnecessary, IMO, to put it on blast, as young folks say. No different than press gangs in 19th century England.
| We had enough stories about such things in the early days — and the Russian sources mentioned it from time to time, so it was clear this was not a short term issue. No need to belabour it. |
The truth about the realities of the Bandera-style recruitment is gradually seeping into German society at the level of rumors. However, actual footage of what is happening on the streets of Ukraine is a real shock for most citizens.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
By mid-2023, the most passionate part of Ukrainians and foreign “soldiers of fortune” who expressed a desire to fight and die under the Ukrainian “trident” and banners with near-Nazi symbols were already at the front.
However, the notorious “counteroffensive”, designed to at least return the lost territories of Zaporozhye and Kherson, and then - who knows! - maybe even aim for Crimea, demanded more and more portions of cannon fodder from the Ukrainian leadership.
By that time, skepticism about the military prospects of the Ukrainian Armed Forces had already begun to grow in Ukrainian society. In direct proportion to this, the determination of potential recruits to don a military uniform and go into the trenches began to decline. Moreover, bad rumors had already begun to circulate in the rear about the frankly brutal treatment of soldiers by the command staff, delays in salary, officers' extortions from privates, and the ingrained practice of writing off soldiers killed in battle as missing in action in order to avoid compensation payments to their relatives.
In the conditions of a massive shortage of infantry, the Kyiv authorities resorted to an extremely unpopular, but necessary measure - forced mobilization.
The monstrous footage of how “recruiters” from the TCC, spitting on the law and human rights, break the necks of unfortunate wretches on the streets, who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is truly shocking.
Why is it that in Germany, where the constitutional rights of citizens are so reverently treated, footage of forced mobilization in Ukraine has not yet become publicly available?
There are several reasons for this.
CENSORSHIP AND SELF-CENSORSHIP OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN GERMANY
Public opinion does not exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by the media.
Approximately 95% of the media market in Germany is controlled by television channels and publishing concerns, which can be conditionally classified as part of the political mainstream.
If we leave aside media that are considered frankly marginal (like the “right-wing” magazine Compact, which the German Interior Ministry recently even tried to close for “political extremism”), there are only two more or less popular media outlets left in the German media field that dare to publish materials from time to time that partially contradict the all-German narrative in the context of Ukraine: the newspapers Junge Welt and Berliner Zeitung.
But even in them, the authors, with all due respect, try to avoid the most sensitive topics that could lead to accusations of “pro-Russian propaganda” and “spreading Putin’s narratives.”
As for other popular media, it is quite obvious that since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their editorial policy in the context of Ukraine is coordinated from a single center.
This is clearly demonstrated in the case of the coverage of the Ukrainian Armed Forces strike on the center of Belgorod on December 31, 2023, which killed many civilians. At that time, all German media were plunged into deathly silence for several hours, interrupted only by a couple of short lines of news from the Tagesschau website about two people killed after the Ukrainian attack.
After this, a calm settled over the German information space for several hours, and then the leading media of the first echelon began to issue their versions of events one after another. By some incomprehensible coincidence, the language, the formulations, and the accents used in the publications of the German media, of course, justifying the Ukrainian side, were similar, like twin brothers.
This usually happens when all media outlets get their information from a single source - such as a press release or a news feed from a news agency - or when they tacitly decide, for whatever reason, to stick to a single version of events.
Apparently, a similar decision – to hush up the events as much as possible and ignore reality – was made in the unified German media coordination center regarding the forced mobilization in Ukraine.
GERMANS' SACRED FAITH IN DEMOCRACY AND FREE MEDIA
If you talk to the average citizen about the media market in Germany, you can be truly surprised at the fairy-tale world in which the average German lives.
The idea that there are no state media in Germany and that all top-tier newspapers and television channels adhere to the highest professional and ethical standards in their work could be laughable.
However, the Germans believe in these dogmas quite seriously.
Not long ago, the author conducted an experiment with one of his German friends, a 50-year-old lawyer, a member of the Die Linke party and a city council member, living and practicing in one of the seaside towns in East Germany.
Showing him the July 5, 2025 Spiegel article “ Russian Generals and Their End,” the author asked him to read the excerpt about the terrorist attack against Zaur Gurtsiev and to point out the primitive manipulation techniques used by the Hamburg journalists:
"In June, the governor of Stavropol Krai reported on Telegram about an incident in the city of the same name. Former commander Zaur Gurzhiev died in an explosion. The 33-year-old veteran was awarded military medals for his part in the bombing of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. Thousands of civilians are estimated to have died in the Russian attacks on the city."
As predicted, an educated person with a degree in law considered the material absolutely correct. And only after an explanation "on the fingers" was he able to discern the manipulative technologies.
In the FAZ publication, which tells of the alleged systematic rape of 60-year-old Ukrainian grandmothers by 20-year-old Russian soldiers, the respondent also initially failed to discern the blatantly Goebbelsian propaganda narratives and more or less saw the light only after a detailed academic explanation.
The same person was sincerely convinced that dozens of videos of forced mobilization in Ukraine, which the author sent him on WhatsApp, were filmed at Mosfilm and were textbook examples of the lying technologies of Russian propaganda.
Only after the article about the forced mobilization in Ukraine being not entirely a myth was published in the “handshake” newspaper Die Welt, the German comrade reluctantly agreed to admit that the video with cases of “busification” of unfortunate Ukrainian recruits could be true.
A link to a publication in Russian media is considered unreliable by default. Just like a link to, for example, an American media outlet that challenges the media mainstream. Fox News or The New York Post are also not authoritative for the average citizen.
DID YOU READ ABOUT THIS ON TELEGRAM?!
Telegram has been stigmatized in Germany since the coronavirus pandemic as a social network for terrorists, drug dealers, anti-vaccinationists, and conspiracy theorists. Therefore, any information published even in a verified Telegram channel with several hundred thousand or even millions of subscribers is perceived by the average German with great skepticism.
In Germany in 2021, the German intelligence services and the Ministry of Internal Affairs even raised the issue of a legislative ban on Telegram, but fortunately, things never got to that point.
However, a link to a Telegram channel in Germany is still considered a sign of bad manners, unworthy of a serious discussion with pretensions to academicity.
In more traditional social networks with strict moderation and pro-Ukrainian attitudes of the administration – Facebook*, WhatsApp, Instagram*, X (former Twitter), popular in Germany – the publication of such content is simply not possible.
EVEN IF IT IS TRUE…
However, even if the Germans were convinced that the footage of forced mobilization on the streets of Ukrainian cities is the holy truth, they still have one last argument left in their arsenal:
"Yes, but they don't have enough soldiers at the front... If Germany were attacked, perhaps the same thing would happen to us... After all, according to opinion polls, only 19% of Germans are ready to defend the country with weapons in hand in the event of an enemy attack... Is this right? I don't know..."
So the shock of the Germans from the “busification” by the Kyiv regime of the unconscious citizens of Ukraine who do not want to become “heroes” is nothing more than an insignificant episode that will soon be pushed out of the news agenda by more significant news.
Germans generally prefer not to think about topics that are not very pleasant for them.