"Living under martial law with a tightly censored media, Ukrainians nevertheless created apps to map real-time location of recruiters to help each other avoid conscription. In Kharkov, the country’s second largest city and a chief target of Russian shelling, the app has 67,000 subscribers. A similar app exists in Lviv, the hotbed of Ukrainian Nazism and the temporary home of the refugees from the East.
Many men opted to join the Territorial Defense Forces on the promise that these units would not be sent to the front lines (they were). Some even flat-out tell officers that they won’t fight for Ukraine because it’s not a real country. In September, Ukraine banned male students from leaving the country for study abroad because too many falsified college admission documents. On the news of Russia’s mobilization, Ukrainian presidential advisor and a frequent guest of Russian opposition news channels Alexey Arestovich stated that college students who are currently exempt from conscription might need to be mobilized. The social media reaction was overwhelmingly negative.
Some darkly sarcastic Americans say that the U.S. is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. At some point we might just run out of Ukrainians willing to fight. We might also run out of ammo. Since the very beginning of the war, it’s been forecasted that Russiaisabouttorunoutofweapons. Maybe they are. But it’s now being revealed that NATO has depleted its supplies of the kind of weaponry we’ve been sending to Ukraine. Our current appropriations are expected to be delivered to the region three years from now.
It does not sound like Putin’s regime is one Ukraine aid package away from crumbling. On the other hand, with Ukraine angling to get NATO involved, it might just fall on the United States to settle this Eastern European border dispute. If that is something we still hope to avoid, then we need to be skeptical of both sides’ narratives and honest with ourselves.
