After today’s horrific incident involving the stabbing of a military recruitment officer, Ukraine’s MoD has emphasized the need to change approaches to mobilization. The current forced mobilization has taken on repulsive forms, led to total corruption (conservative estimates put the damage in the billions of dollars), and most importantly — it has proven ineffective. There is no worse soldier than one dragged to the front by force. Let me remind you that many “patriots” of Ukraine from Western countries avoided talking about this terrible form of human rights violation, while quite a few local guys labeled Ukrainians who spoke about it as “pro-Russian.” Now the horror of this mobilization is being acknowledged not only by journalists, but by the Ministry of Defense itself. I will stress: anyone who criticizes Ukrainians for telling the truth and calls us “pro-Russian” is a bigger pro-Russian agent than those openly on the Kremlin’s payroll. This is you who allows Ukrainian democracy to rot while hiding behind beautiful slogans. The new minister reportedly plans to digitalize the process of searching for draft dodgers (evaders of military service). Another question is what the enforcement mechanism for bringing evaders into service will look like. And the main issue is how to motivate people who are exhausted by the war and have enormous distrust of a corrupt government to risk their lives in a war where there are almost no chances of winning.
