Olya Polyakova said publicly what a significant part of Ukrainian society has long discussed more quietly. Her remarks about fear of the Territorial Recruitment Centers, the use of force against men in public places and the erosion of the line between lawful coercion and abuse were provocative. That does not make the questions behind them less legitimate.
Her comparison of Ukraine to a “concentration camp” is open to serious objection. It is an extreme metaphor, historically loaded and analytically imprecise. But focusing exclusively on that phrase would be an easy way to avoid the harder issue she raised: what happens when citizens begin to doubt whether the law will protect them in an encounter with the state.
Ukraine unquestionably needs mobilization. A country fighting for its survival cannot simply opt out of replenishing its armed forces. But that necessity does not mean every method used to meet mobilization targets becomes acceptable. War expands the legitimate powers of the state; it does not erase human dignity.
As Daycom has previously assessed, this is where Polyakova touched the most sensitive nerve in the debate. Criticism of the TCC is too often reduced to a false binary: either you support mobilization, or you criticize the institutions carrying it out. In reality, abuse can damage mobilization far more effectively than public criticism of abuse.
Societies can endure extraordinary sacrifices when people understand why they are necessary and believe the rules are fair. Ukrainians have accepted curfews, evacuation, economic losses, disruption, danger and immense personal sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands volunteered to serve. But trust is not an unlimited resource.
When the public repeatedly sees videos of several officials restraining one man, forcing him into a vehicle, striking him or humiliating him, the image that remains is rarely that of an administrative procedure. It is the image of state power being used against a citizen.
For a legal assessment, every detail matters. What happened before the recording began? Who used force first? Was there a lawful order? Was the person resisting? Was the detention justified? Those questions are essential in any individual case.
Public psychology works differently.
Repeated images create a pattern. Once enough of them accumulate, the abbreviation “TCC” stops sounding like the name of an administrative institution and begins to sound, for some citizens, like a warning.
That is the fear Polyakova is describing.
A passerby who sees a confrontation between a man and uniformed personnel may no longer understand what is happening. Is it a lawful document check? A detention? An assault? An abuse of authority? Should someone intervene? Call the police? Record the incident? Walk away?
That uncertainty is corrosive in itself.
In a functioning rule-of-law system, the basic boundary should be intuitive: an official may demand compliance with the law, but does not have the right to beat, humiliate or unlawfully deprive a person of liberty.
When that boundary becomes blurred, moral judgment becomes blurred with it. People begin to assess not the act itself, but the status of the person using force.
The question “Is this legal?” is replaced by “Is this the TCC?”
That is a dangerous threshold for any democracy.
A state does not acquire an unlimited moral right to coercion simply because it is fighting a just defensive war. If anything, a country fighting in the name of freedom has an even greater obligation to be careful about the means it uses to defend that freedom at home.
This is the uncomfortable center of the argument.
Ukraine is fighting a system in which the individual has traditionally been treated as a resource of the state. A system in which security institutions are only weakly accountable to citizens and “state necessity” is used to override personal rights.
Ukraine cannot afford to absorb part of that logic under wartime pressure.
The argument that “there is no other way to get people into the army” may sound practical. Strategically, however, it can be disastrous. If mobilization becomes associated with fear, every case of rough coercion encourages more citizens to avoid contact with the state altogether.
People stop updating documents. They avoid formal employment. They travel less. They hesitate to use public services. They organize their lives around minimizing the chance of encountering the mobilization system.
That does not produce a more effective state.
It produces a shadow society.
And that outcome is far more dangerous than one angry statement from a singer.
Ukraine needs citizens who cooperate with the state, not citizens who learn how to hide from it.
There is also a fundamental difference between military obligation and punishment. A person may be legally required to update military records, undergo a medical examination or comply with a lawful order. But mobilization itself should not feel like punishment for the act of walking down the street.
An army does not merely need bodies.
It needs people who will be trusted with weapons, expensive equipment, other soldiers’ lives and difficult decisions. Military service requires discipline, but discipline is not the same thing as humiliation.
A functional mobilization system begins before anyone is stopped in public. It begins with accurate registration, intelligible rules, credible medical examinations, proper training, transparent assignment and confidence that a mobilized person will not disappear into an administrative void.
Responsibility for the current crisis therefore does not lie with TCC employees alone.
The recruitment centers have become the visible face of a much larger problem: manpower shortages at the front, exhaustion after years of war, unequal burdens of service, weak rotation mechanisms and fear of an indefinite military commitment.
If a person does not know how long service may last, where they will be sent, how they will be trained or when they may see their family again, that uncertainty shapes attitudes toward mobilization just as strongly as the behavior of an individual recruitment officer.
That is why neither scapegoating all TCC personnel nor defending them automatically is enough.
The relationship between citizens and the mobilization system itself has to change.
Every use of force should be documented. Every allegation of unlawful detention should receive a rapid, credible response. An official who exceeds his authority should know that a uniform does not create immunity.
And a citizen who assaults a serviceman or violently resists a lawful order should also face consequences under the law.
Trust is built through symmetry.
Not impunity for the citizen.
Not impunity for the state.
Law.
Polyakova also touched on another painful theme: public indifference. People who witness violence often keep walking because they are afraid of being pulled into the conflict themselves.
It is easy to condemn that behavior morally. It is harder to ignore the logic behind it.
If citizens are not confident that the police, courts or other institutions will assess the situation impartially, non-involvement can begin to look like the safest rational choice.
That is how a culture of fear develops.
It does not require mass terror. It can emerge from a large number of ambiguous encounters in which citizens no longer know whether defending another person will expose them to danger.
On that point, Polyakova is right in the most important sense: society should not become accustomed to the sight of a person being forced into a vehicle.
Normalization of violence is dangerous regardless of who is using it.
It is especially dangerous for a country that has spent more than a decade defining its political identity around freedom, human dignity and rejection of the Soviet model of relations between the state and the individual.
Her reference to the “Soviet system” should not be dismissed merely because it was emotional.
The Soviet order was not defined by repression alone. Its deeper principle was the primacy of the state over the person. Citizens were expected to adapt, remain silent and avoid inconvenient questions whenever the authorities invoked necessity.
Ukraine did not go through its revolutions merely to replace one flag with another while preserving that principle.
Freedom does not mean the absence of obligations.
A citizen of a free country can be required to pay taxes, obey a curfew and, in an existential war, serve in the military.
But freedom means that even while fulfilling those obligations, a person remains a citizen — not raw material for a state machine.
That distinction is fundamental.
This is why answering Polyakova with “Who, then, is supposed to fight?” is inadequate.
The real question is harder: how does Ukraine mobilize enough people without allowing the process of mobilization itself to destroy the social contract?
That requires transparent rules for exemptions and deferments, reliable military records, credible medical commissions, punishment for corruption, proper training, fairer rotation mechanisms, greater predictability of service wherever militarily possible and real accountability for abuse of authority.
Such a system is much harder to build than simply increasing street enforcement.
But it is the only model that can sustain manpower over years.
There is another reason why attacking Polyakova for speaking out would be a mistake.
Public figures must be allowed to articulate social fears even when they do so emotionally or inelegantly. A democracy that tolerates only statements consistent with official messaging begins to lose the quality that makes it democratic.
A singer is not required to speak in the language of legislation or a legal brief.
Her role may be precisely to express, emotionally and imperfectly, what other people feel but hesitate to say publicly.
The state’s role is not to take offense.
It is to understand why those words resonate.
If large numbers of Ukrainians find stories about coercive TCC behavior believable, the problem cannot be solved simply by labeling the subject a “Russian narrative.”
Russian propaganda unquestionably exploits every scandal surrounding mobilization. But the strongest defense against hostile propaganda is not suppressing discussion of a problem. It is removing the reality that gives the propaganda power.
No hostile television network can damage confidence in Ukrainian mobilization as effectively as authentic footage of unpunished abuse, if such abuse has actually occurred.
Silence can therefore help the enemy more than open criticism does.
What the Ukrainian state needs now is not quiet.
It needs legitimacy.
Legitimacy means a citizen may hate a decision, fear it and desperately wish not to comply — yet still recognize that the rule is lawful, applies equally and is enforced without humiliation.
That is what sustainable mobilization looks like.
Forcing one man into a vehicle may produce one additional recruit today. A video of the incident may persuade hundreds of others tomorrow to reorganize their lives around avoiding the state.
In a long war, that trade-off matters enormously.
Polyakova’s remarks should therefore not be understood automatically as an attack on Ukraine.
They can also be read as a demand that Ukraine remain the kind of country it says it is fighting to preserve.
Yes, the “concentration camp” comparison was excessive. Yes, the situation cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation between “the people” and “the TCC.” And yes, mobilization remains essential to the state’s survival.
None of those qualifications erase the central point.
Ukraine cannot defeat an authoritarian Russia while teaching its own citizens that the safest response to state power is to stay silent, look away and avoid asking questions.
The strongest answer to Polyakova would not be to demand an apology.
It would be to build a system in which citizens no longer fear an encounter with a representative of their own state on their own street.
Freedom is not tested when governing is easy.
It is tested precisely when a country is at war, desperately needs people and faces the enormous temptation to justify any form of coercion as necessary.
If Ukraine passes that test, it will preserve more than its army.
It will preserve the answer to the most fundamental question of this war: what, exactly, makes Ukraine different from the state it is fighting.
