UKRAINE, KHARKIV — On Feb. 24, 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, issued Decree №69/2022, which announced the conduct of a general mobilization that then continued through the years of Russia full-scale war. Currently, all men eligible for military service between the ages of 18 to 60 have to obtain a military registration. All men aged 25-60 are eligible to conscription unless they are exempt.
In April 2024, the Ukrainian Parliament updated the mobilization law designed to strengthen this process. According to this law, recruitment should consist of several phases.
First, local recruitment officers notify those eligible for military service that they need to go to the recruitment center after checking their ID and military registration documents. Notification groups are working to do this after.
In the second stage, the person arrives at the local recruitment center and, if necessary, clarifies their personal details. Next, they are sent for a medical examination.
In the next stages, recruitment officers check if recruits have any documented official grounds for deferment, being exempt from the service, or being “booked” by the state as a critical worker. If a person, most often male, doesn’t have such documents, the local recruitment centres provide documents for mobilization and send the recruits to the training centers.
That is not what happened on May 11, 2025, in Kharkiv.
On May 11, Kharkiv local Telegram channels shared a video showing a group of men in military uniform talking to a civilian man. Then, one of the men in uniform punched the civilian twice in the stomach.
The next day, the Kharkiv recruitment center officially responded to the incident, confirming that the servicemen in the video were their employees. They claimed that the conflict started because of a “provocation” by a civilian.
Later, Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said that the civilian man in the video is a teacher at one of the city’s schools. His name is Yurii Fediai.
“He is the 8th-grade teacher — a man who had a legal right to deferment and presented the relevant documents during the check,” Terekhov said. Teachers in schools and other state educational institutions are “booked” or reserved from army service in Ukraine.
Fediai filed a complaint with the Kharkiv Regional Police. On May 21, they announced that Serhii Volovyk, the man who hit the civilian in the video and an employee of the local recruitment center, had been given a notice of suspicion.
Law enforcement initiated criminal proceedings under Article 296, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — hooliganism. If found guilty, people charged under this article may face up to five years of imprisonment.
Oleksandr Koniev, the head of Kharkiv recruitment center, said to Ukrainian media Fakty that Volovyk started serving in the army in 2022.
“This soldier served in one of the units on the Izium and Avdiivka axes where he got injured and was transferred to serve in a recruitment center,” said Koniev. He added that, at the end of May, after the criminal proceeding was opened, Volovyk had been transferred to a combat unit again.
In June, Olena Rodina, spokesperson for the regional recruitment center, told Ukrainian media Suspilne that Volovyk is serving on the Zaporizhzhia axis.
Hearings in Volovyk’s trial started in June, in the Saltivskyi district court of Kharkiv.
At the second hearing, the parties reviewed written and electronic evidence and watched the video of the incident. Volovyk admitted that he was the one punching Yurii Fediai in the video.
“Volovyk admitted his guilt and confessed, but today, he disagrees with the classification of the offense. In other words, he does not agree that it constitutes hooliganism,” said Yuliia Palahina, the representative of the Fediai.
Palahina explained that her client had received numerous comments on social media that humiliated him. She also noted that Fediai works as a teacher in a class with teenage students and has health problems. They filed a civil claim seeking compensation of 300,000 hryvnias ($7,168) for moral damages and 21,000 hryvnias ($502) for legal expenses.
According to the lawyer, Volovyk’s defence acknowledged the amount of moral damages only partially, agreeing to compensate 15,000 hryvnias ($358).
The trial lasted four months, during which the court questioned five witnesses, most of whom were also employees of the recruitment center. Palahina stated that the testimony of two of them in court differed from what they had given during the pre-trial investigation. The judge, familiar with the information gathered pre-trial, also pointed out the incoherence between statements.
When the court questioned Volovyk, he said that Fediai did not have the originals of some documents with him.
“Even his ID was a photocopy. That’s why we started to check,” Volovyk said.
He added that he was in a “bad emotional state” and that the Fediai “provoked him with his behavior” — that’s why he hit the teacher twice. Volovyk explained that he thought that Fediai was trying to distract the recruitment officers from his friend, who had run away earlier.
The defence filed a motion to identify the man who was with Fediai on the day of the beating who had likely had run away. The defense wanted to call him as a witness.
The victim’s defense objected to the motion, arguing that the accused’s defense was delaying the trial. The court did not grant the motion.
In the last stage of the trial, during the debates (oral arguments in the USA), the victim’s representative added to the civil claim an extract from Fediai’s medical record. His chronic illnesses got worse during the trial.
Prosecutor Serhii Yakovenko proposed a sentence of four years of restricted liberty for Volovyk.
On Oct. 7, the court sentenced Volovyk to three years of restriction of liberty for punching a teacher during a document check. Restriction of liberty is not imprisonment: Volovyk’s to serve a sentence in open-type institutions — correctional centers.
In addition, the court partially granted the victim’s civil claim, ruling for Volovyk to compensate Fediai 150,000 hryvnias ($3,584) for moral damages and 21,000 hryvnias ($502) for legal expenses. The court fee of 3,000 hryvnias ($72) will be reimbursed from the state budget.
“My main goal was to show and prove that I did not provoke recruitment office employees, which the court confirmed today,” Fediai said.
Fediai’s lawyer added that the case is illustrative and precedent-setting. It is one of the first verdicts in Ukraine in which a recruitment center employee was found guilty of hooliganism against a civilian.
“At least in Kharkiv, there had not been a single verdict where a case was fully prosecuted and recruitment centers employees were punished for their illegal behavior. That is why this case is important. It shows people that if they witness something illegal, they should not be afraid and must report it and defend their rights,” Yuliia Palahina said.
Polls show that 68% of Ukrainians don’t trust recruitment centers, and their attitude towards recruitment process in general has worsened with years of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Last year, the Parliamentary Investigative Commission presented a report on identified violations in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, and other military-related formations. The report drew attention to corruption, stealing humanitarian aid, as well as beatings and cases of deaths in local recruitment centers. Human rights organizations have been reporting on those, too — for instance, on how violations during medical exams lead to people with health problems joining combat units impacting the unit’s capabilities.
In June, Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s ombudsman for human rights, said that his ofiice received over 2,000 complaints about violation of human rights during the mobilization since the beginning of 2025.
Lubinets added that 50 employees of recruitment centres were brought to disciplinary liability and the ombudsman’s office initiates proceedings, including criminal ones, and sends inquiries regarding each complaint.
Hi, my name is Elza. Our newsroom followed Fediai v. Volovyk since the first day. Ukrainian media are often discouraged from following such topics not to “play into Russia’s hand.” And pro-Russian channels really do use Ukrainians’ fears about mobilization and existing cases of violations by recruitment centers’ employees to instill more anxiety and distrust in our society. Still, we followed this story — it received a lot of attention from our Ukrainian audience, so I hoped to show this precedent case for Kharkiv to you. If you want to support our Kharkiv-based newsroom, please, consider buying us a coffee or subscribing to our Patreon.
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