Six weeks after Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, Zelensky extended martial law and general mobilization for three months. Three weeks later, he dismissed all of Ukraine’s regional military commissars and announced that Ukrainian authorities had launched 112 criminal proceedings against 33 regional officials, alleging corruption in the process of military conscription.

Since the beginning of the invasion, Ukrainian authorities have apprehended approximately 20,000 military-aged men who sought to leave the country, either by avoiding border checkpoints or by attempting to pass through them with forged documents. Many other Ukrainian men succeeded in avoiding conscription, often by paying bribes.

Now, a representative of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party has declared that Ukraine expects all Western European countries that have accepted Ukrainian refugees to send men of military age back home so that they can be drafted into the army and sent to the front.

Several days ago, Ukrainian media reported that Poland might extradite Ukrainian ‘draft dodgers’ back to Ukraine, where they could be compelled to participate in near-suicidal assaults on heavily fortified Russian positions.

Austria’s government then rejected extradition, stating “That would be a massive encroachment on our statehood, we would never do that. That would be an attempted intervention in our asylum system and in our statehood, Austria could not entertain that.” Germany followed Austria’s lead, as did Hungary. Zelensky’s plan to reconstitute his army by means of extradition might now be in tatters.

To mitigate the effects of draft evasion, Ukraine’s government has also imposed harsh penalties on conscientious objectors. As the New York Times recently reported: “Conscientious objection to military service is an internationally recognized right, one enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky instituted martial law. With that, the right to alternative service related to conscientious objection effectively evaporated.”

Not only is conscientious objection a “human right,” said Eli S. McCarthy, a professor of justice and peace studies at Georgetown University, it is “critical to commitments that Ukraine has made” to international bodies and aspirations to join the European Union.