Situationen i Ukraina just nu, del 3

“A drone showed up in the sky before every episode of shelling,” he says. “We were trying to hit it but we lacked the ammunition to be able to do that. After every shelling, we carried our wounded across the Russian border as it was impossible for us to transport them through Ukrainian territory. So in the morning we were handing over our wounded to Russians as a report on their work.”

“Grads are not the worst thing. You can get used to them. They are more a kind of moral pressure. The most horrible was when they shelled at us from artillery, and after that we were told that the young Russian artillerists conducted their training this way … The large-calibre artillery is very scary because if this kind of shell hits close there is no way to survive. I’m 1.8 metres (5ft 9in) tall and I can stand under the ground in the shell crater that remains after it hit.”

The Ukrainians resisted the attacks but they have never dared to shoot back across the Russian border. “We didn’t even think about it, we all realised it would be the end for us.” Denys says that eventually the shelling became so intense hundreds of soldiers crossed the border into Russia.

“I am against every war, but especially this war, because it’s meaningless,” said Roman, who has been staying in an apartment in Lviv that belongs to his wife’s relatives. “I think this conflict was created artificially. The Ukrainian mass media helped this along by spreading this patriotic hysteria.”

The military said in September that during partial mobilizations in 13 regions in 2014, 85,792 of those summoned didn’t report to their draft offices and 9,969 were proven to be illegally avoiding service.

President Petro Poroshenko announced that the security service had “detained 19 active critics of mobilization” for their “anti-Ukrainian activity.” New regulations reportedly in the works could soon prevent those eligible from service for going abroad or even leaving their home regions without permission.

Roman, for his part, is nervous. This month, worried that his arguments against the war would attract the attention of the authorities, Roman deleted all the posts on his Facebook page.

“I deleted everything, cleaned out the page, because I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ve been reading the statements of these parliamentarians that social network pages are full of terrorist propaganda … that what you write on networks can be held against you, that censorship should exist even on the Internet.”

The moves come just as Ukraine faces increasing scrutiny for its handling of the detained journalist, Kotsaba, who faces treason and espionage charges for recording a video statement in which he called on Ukrainians to resist Kiev’s “illegal” mobilization, and argued that the conflict in eastern Ukraine was a “civil war,” not an “anti-terrorist operation,” as Kiev officially calls it. (Kotsaba was detained for 60 days and, if convicted, could spend at least 15 years in prison.)

After Kotsaba’s arrest, Anton Geraschenko, an aid to interior minister Arsen Avakov, said he was working with Parliament to introduce legislation making it a crime to publicly call on people to avoid mobilization. On Feb. 7, Geraschenko warned activists planning to hold a picket against mobilization the next day that if they spoke out, each of them would be held for several hours to ascertain their identity, Amnesty International reported.