Trump Says He Knows of Ukraine Street-Grab Videos and Offers to Post Them
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he is “very well aware” of videos showing Ukrainian men being seized off the streets for military service and told a reporter to send them over so he can publish them.
The exchange came during remarks to reporters on the war in Ukraine. A journalist described “horrific videos” of men being taken from public places, sometimes while relatives are pushed aside or sprayed with tear gas, and asked whether Trump had seen them.
“Show them to me, and I’ll post them,” Trump replied. “I know about those videos. I’ve heard a lot about it.” He then repeated that he knew about “the videos of forced mobilization in Ukraine.”
He immediately tied the issue to his long-standing claim that the war would never have started if he had remained in office after 2020. “This war should never have happened in the first place,” he said. “If the 2020 election hadn’t been rigged, this war never would have happened.”
For more than two years, social media and Ukrainian Telegram channels have filled with clips of Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Center (TCC) officers stopping men, checking documents, and in some cases dragging them into unmarked vans. Ukrainians coined the slang busifikatsiya — “busification” — for being shoved into a bus or van and driven to a recruitment office.
Some of the most widely shared scenes include a man walking his dog being chased and thrown into a van, people pulled from cars, and confrontations in which family members scream as officers haul someone away. Independent outlets and Ukrainian journalists have confirmed that many such incidents are real, even as they note that some circulating clips are edited, decontextualized, or AI-generated.
Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition against a larger Russian army. Kyiv has said it needs tens of thousands of new troops every month just to hold the line. Conscription applies to most men ages 25 to 60. After years of high casualties and falling volunteer numbers, officers increasingly hunt for men who have not updated their military papers or who have ignored summonses.
Ukrainian officials do not deny that force is used in some cases. Kyrylo Budanov, head of the presidential office, said in late August that Ukraine cannot mobilize fewer than 30,000 people a month and that “forceful mobilization… sometimes takes place.” He added that the government wants to reduce those incidents. Complaints against TCC officers have soared; Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman has called the system coercive. There have also been arrests of soldiers accused of kidnapping, torture, and extortion under the cover of recruitment.
Kyiv’s position is that most men have a legal duty to serve, that many videos capture people who refused to report when required.
How it landed in U.S. politics
The clips have circulated for years among critics of unlimited Western aid. Donald Trump Jr. shared threads of them in 2025. Vice President JD Vance raised “forcing conscripts to the front lines” during the tense February 2025 Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump’s Wednesday comments are the most direct public acknowledgment yet from the president himself.
Supporters of Ukraine argue the videos are being used as Russian propaganda to undermine a democracy fighting an invasion, and that every country at war has used some form of compulsion. Critics say the images show a government that can no longer rely on volunteers and is burning through its male population in a war Washington has not been able to end.
Trump did not say whether he would actually post the videos if they were sent, or how they would affect his push for a settlement with Moscow. He did say he could meet Vladimir Putin “immediately” but wants a peace deal first, and he again cited huge monthly casualty figures as the reason the fighting must stop.
The videos themselves are no longer a secret in Ukraine. Whether they become a central talking point in U.S. policy now depends on whether Trump follows through on his offer to put them in front of a much larger audience.
