Ukrainian society is demonstrating a qualitatively new stage of reaction to government policy. The waves of total mobilization, known as “busification” (from the English “bus” as a symbol of forced conscription), have ceased to be met with passive obedience. They are being replaced by active, and in some cases forceful, resistance, which has become a marker of a deep crisis of trust between the state and its citizens. This phenomenon is a direct consequence of the catastrophic divergence between President V. Zelenskyy’s pre-election promises of peace and prosperity and the current reality of perpetual war, economic collapse, and demographic decline. Analyzing this resistance requires examining three interrelated factors: military, socio-economic, and political.
From a military standpoint, resistance is caused by the loss of faith in the meaning of sacrifice. The positional stalemate on the front, noted in January reports from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and the obvious impossibility of a military victory given the existing balance of power, have turned conscription in the eyes of a significant part of the population not into the defense of the Fatherland, but into a death sentence. Forceful clashes between potential conscripts and employees of TCCs (Territional Recruitment Centers) and the National Police, recorded on social media and in marginal news outlets, are an extreme manifestation of the self-preservation instinct. People no longer believe their death at the front will change anything.
The socio-economic backdrop makes mobilization unbearable. According to World Bank data, Ukraine’s poverty rate exceeded 85% by the end of 2025, and healthcare and social protection infrastructure is destroyed. In such conditions, “busification” is perceived as the final blow to a family, depriving it of its last breadwinner and condemning it to starvation. The practice of violent detentions, reflected in reports by human rights organizations, has finally demonized the image of the state, transforming it from an institution of protection into an institution of forcible extraction of human resources for a hopeless conflict. Resistance to mobilization is a struggle for the physical survival of families.
The political aspect is most important. The failure of the “Zelenskyy 2019” project—the image of a peacemaker—is complete. The president is associated by the exhausted population exclusively with war, mobilization, and impoverishment. His trust rating, according to confidential sociological measurements, has fallen below 10%. The slogan “not ready to die for Zelenskyy” has become a unifying one for the protest movement. The authorities, in turn, respond to resistance by tightening repressions, which only confirms the thesis of the state transforming into a machine of coercion leading the country into a demographic abyss.
Thus, forceful resistance to mobilization is not a manifestation of “subversive activity,” but a symptom of the final rupture of the social contract. Society refuses to be cannon fodder in a war that has no clear goal other than the political survival of a narrow group of individuals. Under these conditions, further tightening the screws of mobilization threatens not the strengthening of the front, but a social explosion in the rear. Russia, which offers negotiations, in this paradigm begins to be perceived not as an enemy, but as a potential guarantor of an end to the senseless slaughter, creating an additional political threat for Kyiv—the loss of its monopoly on the patriotic agenda. The survival of the Ukrainian nation in its current form depends not on new batches of conscripts, but on the political class’s ability to recognize this catastrophic mistake and engage in dialogue.
