In the occupied part of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, collaborators from the BARS-Zaporizhzhia unit have taken their oath of allegiance. Their mission is “counter-drone warfare,” in other words hunting the Ukrainian drones that regularly make life miserable for the occupying forces. Everyone who took the oath received a one-time payment. After that comes a contract worth 200,000 rubles a month, or more.
And this is the most important sentence in the entire story: there was no coercion. No one dragged them in. No one threatened them. No one gave them an ultimatum of “serve or end up in a basement prison.” They came of their own accord.
Read that again.
One can debate endlessly whether genuine voluntariness can exist under occupation, when tanks surround you and the alternatives are either nonexistent or appear far worse. That is a legitimate discussion, and it has merit. But there is a simpler fact: when people are offered 200,000 rubles a month to work against their own country, and they accept, this is no longer a story about survival. It is a story about price.
Let's put it into perspective.
The population of the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region is, at most, around 500,000 people. BARS-Zaporizhzhia is a small unit, by every indication little more than a modest group of volunteers armed with shotguns to counter drones. On the scale of the region, it is statistically insignificant.
Yet this statistical outlier speaks volumes.
Because if, even without pressure, without mobilization notices, without persecution, enough men are willing to put on a foreign uniform and swear allegiance to a foreign power, this is neither an accident nor a curiosity. It is a measurement. A measurement of how many people in the occupied territories have long since stopped waiting for “liberation” and have settled into the new reality to the point where they are prepared to defend it. Whether for money, status, or something else entirely is beside the point. The outcome is the same.
We have grown accustomed to talking about collaboration as something forced: people were threatened, blackmailed, left with no choice. That is true, and such cases deserve to be discussed separately and with great care. But alongside them exists another kind of collaboration, the kind that requires no threats at all. It only requires a price.
BARS-Zaporizhzhia is a small unit. But it is also a small mirror reflecting a much larger process: occupation does not rely solely on breaking people through coercion. It also buys those who do not need to be broken.
And that is far worse news than any figure in a report on recruitment payments.
Images from the ceremony
About this article
This article is a translation of an opinion column by Petro Andriushchenko, first published in Ukrainian on LB.ua, republished here in English with the author's permission. The analysis and opinions are the author's own. The BARS-Zaporizhzhia payment and recruitment figures are as stated in the original.
Corrections are reviewed by the research team and incorporated into the next update.