Hi’.
If you don’t know what I, a foreigner, am talking about, that’s normal. You’re not reading the NYT, where this article showed up.
After Russia invaded, Ukrainians rushed to enlist and defend their homeland. Now, the government acknowledges, many men are trying to avoid the fight.
It’s a lengthy discussion about corruption and bribes (people paying to avoid being drafted) and, in turn, illegal tactics to fill quotas (confiscating passports or downright kidnapping people). This is proven, this is happening in Ukraine.
While reading that article, I was rushing to defend all this: Ukraine is at war, this is anecdotal, those are wealthy dodgers, blablabla… It’s human nature to parse information and keep only what’s convenient. No, this is happening, this is inexcusable and it is admitted and condemned even by the Ukrainian courts and government.
Ukrainian officials insist that they are cracking down on corruption. President Volodymyr Zelensky recently said the government was going to change the mobilization system, though he did not provide specifics. In August Mr. Zelensky fired 24 regional recruitment chiefs after revelations of rampant bribery schemes surfaced.
Ukraine is still fighting corruption, we know it and this is just another stigma.
With that said…
… many, many, many people conclude from this that the Ukrainians actually don’t want to fight, don’t want this war and are being forced by the US / Europe whatever. No (Kyiv Independent).
Three-quarters of Ukrainians are against any territorial concessions in exchange for peace with Russia, according to a poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) on Dec. 14 [2023].
That’s not a forged poll, it’s probably the same one Bloomberg uses to try and suggest the opposite (Bloomberg). But the reality remains: 74% of Ukrainians want to keep going. Their problem is not the casualties and recruitment; their problem is corruption and illegal recruitment. And yes, they had draft dodgers since day one.
So this diary is just to vent about this lazy and just wishful interpretation.
And for that purpose I’ll go back to Switzerland.
The great thing with Switzerland is we have initiatives and referendums at the federal level. Imagine being able to vote whether or not to build the wall; whether or not to have a public option; whether or not to extend the child tax credit… Well Switzerland can do that. And Switzerland has a problem: it has a heavily-regulated private health insurance market. As a result, it also has yearly premium hikes, in the single-digit; and as a result it is recurring news and a constant political topic. So we voted to fix this (I mean single-payer). We voted. Four times. As in the people put their ballot in the box and chose to do nothing. Four times we voted no.
Why am I saying this? Because we voted for those premium hikes. Not lobbies. Not an obscure administration. Not some foreign power nor anything. It was us. The population. Voting, expressing our will and willfully voting for yearly premium hikes. Don’t ask why, we are Swiss but the point is, the population directly made that choice.
The same population also banned minarets, adopted the 15% minimum corporate tax rate and picked a deep-penetration stealth bomber to police its sky.
So let’s go back to Ukraine. And Russia.
Ukraine first.
No, Ukraine is not running out of men. They are talking about lowering the mobilization age to 25: that’s not what you call desperate, that’s what you call preserving resources. But to make my point I will point to a previous instance where people went “Ukraine is out”: training.
Remember Severodonetsk? Back in July-August 2022, something like that, stories emerged of soldiers having only weeks to even days of training before being sent to the frontline. One particular story was about soldiers being thrown to be shelled to death at Pisky. People heard that and concluded that surely Ukraine was on its last leg, so desperate that it was hurrying people blindly. And admittedly there was a bit of that but a year later Ukraine is still there and forming new brigades. Because yes they are forming new brigades, by the way.
So, no, Ukraine is not running out of manpower.
Russia next.
Russia also had training trouble, from their partial mobilization (fortune.com) and frankly before that, to today (businessinsider.com). Russia rushed entire army corps to the front (pravda.com.ua). Yet when it’s Russia, the same people calling Ukraine done just shrug. And yes, likewise none of that can be generalized, Russia still has trained units and is showing just as much resilience. But that’s the point.
Russia has been having recruitment problems as well to the point of people burning recruitment offices (charter97.org) for a year now (pravda.com.ua). The number I found of Russians fleeing Russia during the partial mobilization is 700k (Wikipedia). Consequently, Russia is paying soldiers a fortune, hiring in prisons and so on. If recruitment problems were an indication of scraping the bottom of the barrel, the war would be over a year ago.
Which brings us back to this NYT article.
Again: yes, there are illegal practices to coerce people into the military, and no matter the nuances that must be condemned.
But no, this is not proof of Ukraine being a fascist State controlled by the CIA forcing children to fight.
And those kinds of wild interpretations discourage people from even acknowledging facts; because admitting those facts ends the conversation; so you’ll see plenty of people who, just like they tried to argue that there was no stalemate, would now — like I was tempted to — do mental gymnastics to excuse those practices; the very practices we denounce when Russia does it. Because we support Ukraine and it’s faster to reject the fact than to explain why the implication is ludicrous. Dixit the above nth paragraphs it took me to, and those swayed no one.
I’m thankful to the NYT for reporting such issues, as objectively as they can.
It’s not their fault that people will read in it whatever is convenient for them.
And I’ll repeat: Ukrainians didn’t want this war, and now that Russia forced it on them they want to fight. Three-fourths of them are willing to fight; not their government, not the CIA or whatever conspiracy; the Ukrainian population itself. For those who want to backstab Ukraine and Europe, you’re doing it for yourself, not for them.