"Volunteers are great, of course," Kydon said at a Kiev recruiting center. "But we need everybody to understand that all the specialists being brought into the army are being drafted."
There have been sporadic and localized public protests against the draft, mostly in remote rural areas in the west of the country, far from the eastern battlefields.
There has also been some draft-dodging, although no national figures have been released. In Dnipropetrovsk, a province of 3 million people in central Ukraine, 30 criminal cases have been opened. Enlistment officials in the western Lviv region are investigating what they deem a suspiciously high number of sick notes presented by doctors called up for military service.
Lavrienko, who received his military summons in mid-July, said the prospect of combat is frightening but he believes the country is doing the right thing.
"Of course it's terrifying," he said. "But don't just go about shouting that you're a Ukrainian and a patriot. Real patriots go and fight, while the others sit around to see how things are going to play out."
Many aren't waiting to be called up. Since the early days of the conflict, the slow-moving efforts of the standing army have been complemented by a clutch of volunteer paramilitaries.
One, the Dnipro Battalion, has reportedly received substantial financial backing from a billionaire oligarch. Another, the Azov Battalion, is accused by its detractors of being a hotbed of extremist right-wing sentiment.
And more volunteers are coming forward - even people like fast-food mogul Konstantinovsky, who put his Rolls-Royce up for sale to raise money for the war effort before joining the armed forces. It was a notable gesture in a country where it is widely assumed that the wealthy can buy their way out of military service.
Matelsky, the truck driver, showed up at an enlistment office in Kiev last week with a bag containing nothing but a change of clothes, two jars of pickled vegetables and a small religious medallion given to him by his girlfriend.
"When I enter the service, they'll put me in a uniform, give me boots and feed me three times a day," he said. "My future now is in the hands of the motherland."
