First Front, Second Class: Human Rights in Ukraine, a Country Defending Itself

In the Oval Office on September 2, 2026, a reporter asked the President of the United States whether he had seen the videos: men in Ukraine seized off the street, their wives and mothers thrown down and pepper-sprayed. He said he knew about them. He said he had heard a great deal about it.This book is what is behind the videos.A man walks out of a shop. A minivan stops. Within twenty-four hours a medical commission that the defense ministry's own order allows six days to examine him has spent four minutes, found him fit, and produced a document no court will look behind. That sequence has been repeated across Ukraine for two years, and almost every part of it breaks a rule Ukraine wrote for itself before the war began.First Front, Second Class assembles the record the Ukrainian state keeps on itself. A monitoring report from the human rights commissioner describing men held for up to fifty days in a recruitment center, with three mugs between sixty of them. A public broadcaster's count of twenty-five deaths shortly after detention - a figure no government body keeps, because no one is required to. Court rulings annulling call-up orders for want of a served summons. A parliamentary commission's finding that of 166 cases concerning the beating of men liable for service, seventeen reached a court. Criminal proceedings for leaving a unit rising from 6,988 in 2022 to 110,511 in seven months of 2025, at which point the statistic was classified.It is also a book about who goes, and who does not. Exits are bought with three currencies: money, information and connections. One point three million men are lawfully exempt because of where they work, and the composition of that list has never been published. The men who cannot buy an exit are the men in the vans.All of it is set beside the other side of the front, where Russia pays up to 2.6 million rubles for a signature on a contract with no end date, has formally sanctioned pits for men who refuse, and imprisons anyone who writes the equivalent of this book - and beside the older cases every wartime state meets in the end: New York in 1863, Turkestan in 1916, Vietnam, and Israel's exemption fight, struck down again by its own Supreme Court on the day this book closed.Nobody in these pages argues that Ukraine should stop fighting; it could not and should not. The argument is that a country fighting for its survival cannot afford to be the country in those videos, and that the fix is no mystery. Most of it is already written into Ukrainian law, already recommended by Ukraine's own institutions, and left undone. The closing chapters set out what it would take, including three things that would cost nothing at all.Documented throughout from Ukrainian courts, Ukrainian prosecutors, Ukrainian commissioners and Ukrainian newsrooms. Not one Russian state source. No one accused of anything is named.