Security Guarantees - Busification 

Security Guarantees - Busification is a mobile public art project working with the symbol of contemporary Ukrainian culture, depicting the system of institutionalized violence, in which buses serve as a threshold behind which people without money or connections are being extracted from society, forced to go to war against their will. This project raises issues of unfulfilled security guarantees and systemic class oppression, while questioning the selective application of fundamental values and rights.



Busification in the narrowest sense of the term refers to a specific method of forced conscription. It features minibuses into which teams of mobilizers from local recruitment offices push men selected on the street to induct them into the military. Zooming out, one must ask: where does Ukrainian society stand in the global hierarchy of safety? And why should the state be treated any differently than it treats its own citizens, whose constitutionally guaranteed security rights are violated in a heartbeat?

While the Ukrainian authorities demand Security Guarantees on the global stage, they have turned the country’s interior into a space of lawless enforcement. By rendering basic rights like personal inviolability and due process obsolete, the state has weaponized martial law not to protect its citizens, but to strip them of agency. Consequently, contemporary Ukrainian culture has trapped itself in a dark irony: absolute security guarantees are demanded for the ruling establishment, while institutionalized violence and class-based subjugation are enforced upon the rest.

Delusional, privileged groups, often promoted as prominent national artists, remain trapped in propaganda streams, affirming that they live in a democratic society. Choosing to ignore busification, they remain complicit in the systemic crisis, shielded by the silence of European media. Consciously or not, artists whitewash a corrupt and repressive regime where militaristic violence and terror against its own citizens, including kidnappings for ransom, physical abuse, and fatal abuses of power, have become commonplace, leaving no doubt that the people’s rights have been entirely extinguished.

This project aims to draw attention to an alternative point of view and to highlight the necessity of recognizing, acknowledging, and remembering these crimes as an important part of the historical record. Just as the war is framed within the context of the Russian invasion, any discussion of this conflict should always include busification as an integral part of it. Viewers can familiarize themselves with the tactics used by the Ukrainian military against its own citizens via the busification video archive.