This is an author column. The story from Russia’s Penza region matters to me not only as another frightening episode of the war. It shows the moment when the state stops even pretending that military service is voluntary and starts treating people as expendable material.
What happened
In mid-June, reports began coming from Penza, Kamenka, Kuznetsk and other towns in the region about raids involving law enforcement officers, enlistment office staff and people in civilian clothing. According to Mediazona, Meduza, Important Stories, Radio Liberty and human rights projects, men were stopped on streets and roads, taken to enlistment offices and, according to relatives, pressured into signing contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry.
The most visible episode was a video filmed outside the enlistment office at 19 Skladskaya Street in Penza during the night of June 17. Women try to speak with men sitting in a minibus, ask whether they signed contracts voluntarily, and demand that they not be taken to the war. Relatives describe beatings, confiscated phones and lawyers being kept away. Official agencies, for their part, deny mass coercion and describe the events as checks of military registration.
I am deliberately careful here: some testimonies still require verification. But even the confirmed picture is enough to see the main point. In a peaceful country, a man should not disappear after meeting people in uniform, and his wife or mother should not learn that he is now a “volunteer” through the closed door of a bus.
Why it matters
For a long time, the war rested on the illusion of choice: whoever wanted to sign a contract went to the army; whoever did not want to go stayed home. That illusion was convenient for the authorities because it allowed them to pretend that the country was not mobilized, but merely “supporting the army.” Yet when the front constantly needs new people, voluntariness quickly turns into a paper decoration.
At first, coercion is easier to direct at those society is not used to defending: migrants, newly naturalized citizens, prisoners, people with addictions, debtors, and those who do not know their rights well. Then the boundary moves further. Penza shows exactly that shift. If the state is allowed to break some people, it will inevitably try to break others.
What alarms me is not only the violence itself, but the bureaucratic cynicism around it. A person can be frightened, pushed into signing, issued documents and a bank card, and then this can be called a voluntary decision. Formally, on paper, everything looks tidy. In reality, it is the transformation of a citizen into prey.
My conclusion
Silence cannot defeat war. It is a mistake to think that if today they took someone else, and not me or my son, the system will stop there. It will not stop, because the war demands more and more people, and the authorities have learned to take them wherever they meet the least resistance.
My position is simple: no contract extracted through fear, threats, or isolation from family and a lawyer is voluntary. No enlistment quota can stand above a human life. And no official wording about “checking registration” cancels the moral fact: people must not be dragged to war like cargo.
Penza is a warning to all of Russia. If society accepts abduction as a method of army recruitment, tomorrow that method will become a routine administrative procedure. The only honest answer is not to get used to it, not to justify it, and to keep saying the main thing: this war must be stopped, and people must be brought home, not hunted for the front.