RWA had some interesting perspective on this recently that goes a bit against the narrative of “Ukraine is pulling people off the streets, because there’s nobody left”. Essentially what they said was that Ukraine is such a poorly centralized and governed state with a weak bureaucracy nobody knows how many people live in the country and where, the war and refugee situation only exaggerated this. Estimates of Ukrainian population before the war ranged between 30 and 40 mio, because afaik they haven’t been able to administer a census this century.
So the problem according to that isn’t so much that there’s nobody left physically, but that they’re struggling heavily to reach the people that are or should be there, if they even know these people exist. Hence the pulling people off the streets - they just can’t reach them any other way.
I’m sure census in Ukraine is pretty much non existent, but at the very least pulling people off the street indicates that people aren’t exactly lining up to go to war on their own.
It is, but I think it’s highly unlikely to find people keen for war in any conflict past a certain early euphoria. As propagandized as the Ukrainian people have been these past months and years, I still doubt your average Ukrainian is keen to die a miserable, horrible death in some trench somewhere in Donbass if they can avoid it - no more than the average Russian is.
Them being pulled of the streets could be an indicator of waning morale, but imo it’s plausible that it’s mostly for logistical reasons. It’s just easier to grab someone from the gym, than for some central authority to reach them via their postal address.
It’s possible, but this will drive panic all of itself. As people see videos others being pulled off the streets, that’s going to be incredibly demoralizing. It’s hard to believe your side is winning the war when you see this kind of stuff happening around you.
You’re most likely right, i heard that part about UA don’t even knowing how many people there are multiple times by now.
“For unclear reasons, officials in western Ukraine have been the most aggressive” 🤔🤔🤔
There’s so much vagueness in this article in all the most slimy places. Vague gestures to “violence” and shocking “prosecutions.” Guess they can’t really go into detail or the Naziness will be hard to disguise with purple prose.
I just can’t imagine why people aren’t excited to go into this meat grinder https://www.newsweek.com/bakhmut-life-expectancy-near-four-hours-frontlines-ukraine-russia-1782496
this is remarkably negative about Ukraine considering its the fucking economist. i wonder if the propaganda machine really is getting orders to pivot to china so the west can pullout of Ukraine without losing too much face.
That’s the impression I’m getting. NATO has recently been admitting that they can’t match Russia in military production, and they failed to get the rest of the world to ostracize Russia as they hoped. Russian economy is now doing better than most western ones, and countries are starting to decouple from the west at an accelerating pace now. I imagine there are people in power who are starting to realize what an utter debacle this has been.
Imagine thinking you could out-produce Russia, fail (and run out of bullets), and then double-down and think you could out-produce China.
yeah that’s absolute clown shit
Which is ironic, because China has even more money and scientific know-how and resources than Russia has.
