“Ukrainian prisoners of war were shown videos of ‘busification,’ but they thought it was propaganda”, – ombudsman

Ukrainian soldiers who had long been held in Russian captivity were shown videos of forced conscription—dubbed busification—but they considered them propaganda. After returning home, their views changed.

This was stated by the Ukrainian president’s commissioner for the protection of servicemen’s rights, Olha Reshetylova, in an interview with Hromadske Radio.

“I spoke with one of the released prisoners of war who said that when they were shown propaganda by [Russian propagandist] Solovyov, who claimed that forced mobilization was taking place in Ukraine, they laughed and said: ‘This is propaganda, that can’t happen in Ukraine! Everyone would defend their home.’ These were people who spent three years in captivity. When they returned, they realized that some of that propaganda had a grain of truth, and they were very surprised,” Reshetylova recounted.

She added that she still doesn’t understand “how we got to this point.”

“Some will say it was a failure of information policy, a lack of sufficient propaganda. My position is that propaganda never influences Ukrainians. The more propaganda there is, the more resistance to it. The question is that at some point something went wrong. The fact is that at some point, the critical mass of those who wanted to defend their home went to do so. And my task is to make the adaptation period for those who join the Armed Forces of Ukraine not of their own free will as humane as possible,” she outlined.

Earlier, MP Heorhiy Mazurashu said that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have faced a shortage of willing fighters since the summer of 2022, when street round-ups of conscripts with forced delivery to recruitment centers—what has come to be called “busification”—began.

The head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Oleksandr Zavitnevych, recently admitted that he absolutely hates busification.