Beneath is the text of the leaflet distributed outside both the Russian and Ukrainian embassies in London by members of the Anarchist Communist Group and the Network of Anarchist Internationalists (NAI) on Saturday October 31st
For the past five years, the warring states of Ukraine and Russia have been sending the working class to die on the battlefields, killing civilians across the war zone and destroying critical infrastructure with missiles and drones. European states are arming Ukraine, helping to keep the war of the trenches going on indefinitely—a war that has already lasted longer than WWI—in order to lay the groundwork for the revitalisation of their declining industry by shifting it more and more toward a war economy. The endless war, financed by loans from Europe and the USA, allows states to carry out their ideological, bureaucratic and technical “defensive” restructuring, as well as the broader restructuring of production, at a time when the US is pulling back from funding the war in the region and the whole planet is beginning to smell of gunpowder. The loans under the Rearm Europe arms program and the record ‘defence’ budgets being pushed by Europe point with certainty toward war austerity, in other words an even harsher exploitation of the working class, as its future wages are put up as collateral for current spending. In 2025, global military spending reached $2.887 trillion, the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI, while Europe increased its military spending by 14% in a single year. European military spending reached an average of 3.2% of GDP, up from 2.8% in 2024.
The Death Camp that is Ukraine, hemmed in on all sides, built jointly by Russia on the one hand and the USA and Europe on the other, plays a key role in spreading militarisation throughout European societies: expanding the arms industry, increasing military spending, intensifying and generalising conscription, recruiting men and, to
some extent, women into the armed forces with the lure of a career, and repressing those who refuse to take part.
Within this process, desertion and draft resistance movements play an important role in undermining the ideology of national unity and the state’s ability to keep mobilising entire populations for war. This is why the widespread draft resistance and desertion in Ukraine and Russia—300,000 deserters and 2,000,000 draft dodgers in the former, and more than 75,000 deserters and 260,000 draft dodgers as early as September 2022 in the latter—is so significant and deserves the support of the antiwar movement. The stories of violence and imprisonment suffered by those resisting mobilization on both sides of the front show what the militarisation of society means
in practice, and what it costs to refuse to fight for the state and the bosses.
In Russia, which has recently entered a phase of silent mass mobilisation, deserters—most of them forcibly recruited through coercion and blackmail—are being summarily executed on the spot by their own commanders (zeroing out). Along the borders of Ukraine, men trapped inside the country by martial law—which prevents them from leaving for safer countries—are trying to cross frozen mountains and rivers to escape
mobilisation. Some freeze to death; others drown. Those forced to remain in the country are left at the mercy of the TRCs, a special military unit that rounds up men from the streets, their workplaces, public transport stops, cafés and outside schools. They are thrown into vans and taken to the front in a practice that has become known
as busification’. Those who physically resist busification or take part in armed resistance inside training centers end up facing crushing prison sentences. When an army lifer is killed in such an incident, the sentence is life imprisonment.
Bogdan Koshel, 27, was drafted in Kyiv in June 2025. After contemplating suicide, he eventually turned his weapon on the military bastards who were training him and was sentenced to life in prison on June 9, 2026, for the deaths of two of them. Twenty three-year-old Oleg Gavrilov and five others arrested under martial law for
“obstructing mobilization” during the July 8, 2026 uprising in a neighborhood of Lviv against a busification operation are being prosecuted for assault against police officers. Twenty-seven-year-old Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk was sentenced to 15 years in prison not for any physical attack or act of resistance, but simply for expressing antiwar views in articles published on the World Socialist Website. These are only a few of the hundreds who have disappeared into state cells, with no solidarity network to support them. Even legal defense by independent lawyers has become difficult, since they risk being subjected to busification the moment they
appear in court, or becoming targets of beatings.
Women who defend men against busification and run social-media groups documenting TRC checkpoints are also targeted by uniformed thugs, cops and far right paramilitaries. Those who support men trying to escape busification are beaten by cops, pepper-sprayed and otherwise assaulted; after their arrest, they can receive
five-year suspended sentences and be placed under supervision. Angela Gurena was sentenced to five years in prison without suspension for posting a TikTok video showing soldiers rounding up men during a busification operation.
Even civilians are thrown into so-called “penal colonies,” a soviet holdover in the prison system, because they are accused of alleged—and perhaps, in some cases, actual— “collaborationism” with the Russian administration in the formerly occupied territories. At “Penal Colony” No. 86 in Vinnytsia, alleged “collaborators” went on hunger strike on August 5 and again on September 11, protesting the brutal conditions of their detention, including torture and 12-hour forced labor.
Across Ukraine, 620 incidents of armed and/or unarmed resistance to busification and 272 attacks on TRCs have been recorded since the beginning of 2026.
On the other side of the front, in Russia, more than 20,000 people have been arrested for antiwar actions since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Some were arrested for antiwar graffiti, others for setting fire to military recruitment offices, and others for sabotaging railway lines carrying military
supplies to the front. More than 40 people had already been sentenced by the end of Russian proletarians who hit military recruitment offices with Molotov cocktails or sabotage railway lines are not always motivated exclusively by anti-militarist or antiwar convictions. In many cases they are anti-regime or motivated by pro-Ukrainian sentiments. However, even when such actions are done out of solidarity with the Ukrainian population, from pacifist or internationalist anarchist or communist convictions, they are still prosecuted as terrorism or as collaboration ‘with the enemy’.
In any case, those involved face heavy sentences and vindictive treatment inside the prisons where they are held.
The case of the ‘Chita anarchists’ is a telling example. Aleksandr Snezhkov and Lyubov Lizunova, two young people who wrote an antiwar slogan and set up an antiwar group on Telegram, were convicted as terrorists. Aleksandr was sentenced to 11 years in prison, while 17-year-old Lyubov was sent to a juvenile penal colony far from where herfamily lives. The anarchist Alexey Rozhkov was sentenced to 16 years in prison for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a military recruitment office, which, much to our regret,
caused minor damage.
Some men in Russia who took a stand against the war have lost their lives. Among them was 43-year-old anarchist pacifist Dmitry Kuznetsov, who died after being beaten and tortured in prison, and 20-year-old conscript Seryozha Gridin, who died by suicide in February 2023 at a military base near Moscow rather than fight in Ukraine. In a note, he wrote: “I decided to die here, in my homeland, without foreign blood on
my hands.”
Imprisoned Russian activists are calling for contact with the internationalist antiwar movement. Through their relatives and lawyers, they have made clear that they can endure prison, but not isolation. Contact addresses for reaching them are available through Solidarity Zone and the Anarchist Black Cross.
https://solidarityzone.net/political-prisoners/
https://wiki.avtonom.org/en/index.php/Category:Currently_imprisoned_in_Russia
END ALL THE STATE PRISONS, IN RUSSIA, UKRAINE, ISRAEL AND EVERYWHERE
WE STAND WITH DESERTERS AND DRAFT EVADERS
IMPRISONED ENEMIES OF WAR, YOU ARE NOT ALONE