Near Kyiv, a territorial recruitment center employee shot a man who tried to escape a document check

In the Kyiv region, a staff member of the territorial recruitment center shot at a man on the grounds of a warehouse.

The incident was captured on video by a witness and shared on Telegram channels.

The footage clearly shows a man in military uniform aiming and shooting at a man in civilian clothes who is running away, while gunshots can be heard.

Following the video’s release and the resulting public outcry, the police issued a statement. According to them, the incident took place in the village of Shchaslyve, and the shooter was not a recruitment officer but “a representative of a volunteer formation of the territorial community.”

However, the Ministry of Defense reported that it was indeed a staff member of the recruitment center who fired the shots. The main inspectorate of the ministry is already investigating the incident.

The police, nevertheless, continued to assert that the shooter was a civilian member of a “volunteer formation, present as part of a notification group.” The man who was fleeing had reportedly been a passenger in a vehicle and attempted to escape onto the premises of an enterprise when the notification group was checking the driver’s documents. According to the police statement, the representative of the group fired “two shots into the air,” though the video clearly shows shots being fired at the back of the fleeing man while in motion.

“The police seized a device for firing rubber bullets and casings. Investigators from the Boryspil police department in Kyiv region classified the actions of the volunteer formation member under Part 4 of Article 296 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The sanction for this article provides for up to seven years of imprisonment,” the police statement read.

It should be noted that in Odesa and other Ukrainian cities, “voluntary police assistants” are working alongside territorial recruitment centers to carry out forced mobilization and have been implicated in corruption schemes.