Ukrainian police handcuffed an investigative journalist over a draft violation, which his newsroom says does not exist. On 27 July in Kyiv, police detained hromadske journalist Yevhen Shulhat, stopping the taxi he was riding in. At hromadske, Shulhat investigated corruption, including alleged cases involving members of Ukraine's law enforcement agencies.
The officers said the stop was based on an alleged violation of military registration rules, but according to documents in the newsroom's possession, the journalist had no such violation.
The detention echoes a case that two years ago cost a senior security official his job. Shulhat is the investigative journalist who, in 2024, while at Slidstvo.info, exposed the elite real estate of Illia Vitiuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) cybersecurity department, and was then targeted with a draft summons that surveillance footage showed had been arranged by Vitiuk's subordinate. The resulting public outcry led President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fire Vitiuk in May 2024.
The newsroom says the detention was targeted
Shulhat said the police used physical force against him. His editors questioned how the officers could have known anything about his military-registration status in the first place.
"How police officers could have known about a taxi passenger's military-registration violation is unclear. At the same time, the driver's documents did not interest the police, which gives grounds to assume the detention was targeted," said Yaroslava Volvach, head of hromadske's investigations desk.
The detail she points to, that the officers checked only the passenger and not the driver, is what makes an ordinary document check look like something aimed at a specific person.
The police account shifted through the evening
The official version arrived in pieces and changed. Kyiv police first said they had stopped the car to check documents and that Shulhat refused, then offered to take him to a territorial recruitment center to clarify his military-registration data.
Later updates complicated that account. Police said they had delivered Shulhat to a district recruitment center because, by their preliminary information, he had not passed a military medical commission in the established order, while the newsroom's documents showed no registration violation before the two officers detained him. Then, the police told hromadske they did not know Shulhat's current whereabouts and were checking the claim that he had not passed the medical commission. The journalist was out of contact. Kyiv's city recruitment center eventually confirmed he had been delivered to a district center and said he had been sent to undergo the medical commission.
The draft has been used against critics before
Shulhat's case may become the sharpest example of how Ukrainian authorities have been accused of turning conscription into a tool against inconvenient people.
Euromaidan Press could not independently verify Shulhat's military-registration status. What is established is that hromadske says its documents show no violation and that the officers checked only the journalist, not the driver.
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