The war in Ukraine has long stopped being fought only at the front. A scene from Lviv, a city far from the front lines, showed the other, muffled war - the one between the state and its own citizens. On 8 July, in the Sykhiv district, a group of people overturned a vehicle of the military recruitment centre after officers stopped a man born in 1996 to check his military documents.

According to the recruitment centre (TCC), the man had allegedly breached the rules on military registration and had been hiding from service since 12 June. But what the authorities call a "document check," eyewitnesses describe quite differently. "They beat him, shoved him into a van and drove off. People rose up. No one has the right to grab a child and throw him into a van," a woman from the scene recounted.

The regional military chief Maksym Kozytskyi promised an official investigation into the legality of the recruitment staff's conduct, and the police claim they only maintained public order. But the very fact that ordinary citizens dare to overturn a state vehicle speaks of something deeper than a single incident - of the cracked trust between the people and the way mobilisation is carried out.

This is the part of the war that rarely reaches the front pages. While the world watches missiles and fronts, in the cities behind the line a quiet drama plays out: families hiding sons, vans grabbing men off the street, neighbours coming out to defend them. Every long war eventually starts eating its own state from within. For a region that remembers its own mobilisations and its own flights from the uniform, this picture is neither distant nor unfamiliar.