u/rondeuce40

• A Ukrainian military breakthrough is imminent, in other words, and Ukraine’s population remains committed to endless fighting. But this is hard to square with Ukraine’s growing recruitment crisis, most viscerally embodied by the growing violent resistance to its policy of forced conscription.

• As the war has gone on, civil disobedience against conscription practices has turned increasingly violent. The year 2025 was bookended by killings of draft officers. At the close of January, a man showed up at a military training center and shot dead a TRC officer who had “recruited” an acquaintance of his. In December, a draft officer was fatally stabbed in the groin by a man whose papers he asked to see, and who went on to attack three other officers before fleeing.

• The violence has only escalated this year. The end of this past January saw a man kill a draft officer and escape with one of the conscripts he was escorting. February saw at least two separate attacks on TRC officers in Kharkiv and in the Lviv Oblast, with the latter suspected by police of trying to help a conscript escape. A month later, a group ran a minivan driven by recruiters off the road and broke in to free the conscript they were transporting.

• According to government figures, these incidents are just a handful of more than 600 attacks on enlistment officers carried out since the start of the war, with the number of assaults nearly tripling from 2024 to 2025, when 341 were recorded. The first four months of 2026 alone have seen at least 117 attacks, more than 20 times the five that were recorded in the war’s entire first year.

• Other metrics point to a silent reluctance to fight. Ukraine’s own defense minister revealed this year that there were 2 million draft dodgers and 200,000 cases of desertion. While voluntary enlistment drove the war’s early months, conscription is now responsible for 70% of recruitment. Ukrainian nationals who fled to Europe at the start of the war have resisted European efforts to send them back, in some cases to be drafted at the Ukrainian government’s request.

• While affluent Ukrainians are able to bribe their way out of being conscripted, the commander of Ukraine’s National Guard has urged those who “have money problems” to join the military. According to one analysis of Ukrainian casualty figures, the vast majority of those killed in action come disproportionately from small towns, where poverty rates tended to be higher.

• Much of this is unknown to Western publics. English-language reports about violent resistance to conscription are dwarfed by stories claiming Russia is faltering. Some Ukrainian-language reports about the country’s recruitment and demographic crises are simply never translated to English. And so, those who most ardently back Ukraine unwittingly cheer policies that ensure its gradual destruction.

For all the flashy news stories about Ukraine's drone strikes in Moscow and other attacks on infrastructure, it fails to mask the reality on the ground that Ukrainians no longer want to fight this war sans the Bandera lovers. The West hopes that their pin prick attacks will somehow get the people to rise up against Putin, stop Russia's military advancements on the battlefield and somehow put Ukraine in a favorable position. Those things are unrealistic at this stage and it's long past time for some diplomacy which the West will not do.

Bill Maher does a New Rule about how you should support everyone's favorite country while no one in the audience laughs at his jokes. Mileikowsky must've written his monologue.

Alex Karp, whose hair looks like he just stuck a fork into an electrical socket thinks your kids should have mandatory military service just like everyone's favorite country. Joe Rogan is having none of it.

To sum this clip up, Elensky is a coked up, money laundering dictator. UKRAINE IS WINNING!!!!