As a series of posts directed against the Russian state was published, about forty people unsubscribed from my Telegram channel, and now I intend to exacerbate the situation by taking a swipe at the state of Ukraine.
The Great Patriotic War is taking place in Ukraine. The national spirit is strong, and the Javelins are fast; if only there were a no-fly zone, the occupiers would have been destroyed in a week, and without it, the task will stretch until summer, provided, of course, that the “snuffbox” factor doesn’t play a role. The state trusts its citizens so much that it distributes combat weapons to them without any documents and has officially declared that the killing of Russian soldiers by private individuals is not a criminal offense. In essence: be partisans, you have our blessing. Foreign volunteers are flocking to the country because human hunting is the most exciting of hunts, as we have read much about in the classics. To top it all off, the Ukrainian government is receiving serious amounts of aid not only in weapons and humanitarian cargo, but also in money.
The question is, why the hell does military conscription still exist in Ukraine? Why the hell are men up to 60 years old not allowed to leave the country? Firstly, this is sexism (well, that’s me lightly touching upon the “agenda”). Secondly, this is direct state slave-ownership. Thirdly, it is simply inefficient. If a man has already reached the border, he certainly does not intend to fight. He intends to get his family to a safe place, and there, in that safe place, he will at least no longer be a burden to the Ukrainian state social security system, will not increase the casualty count of the civilian population, and will hover before Russian embassies with a Ukrainian flag—and then, who knows, he might even return to join the war, but voluntarily. This is quite likely, especially given the fact that Ukraine is able to pay its soldiers quite generously, while refugees can only rely on their own savings and the help of the local Russian-Ukrainian diaspora.
The question is, why the hell has Ukraine kept border guards and especially customs officers on its western border at all? Does the state have nowhere to put its people? Does the state wish to obstruct the free movement of goods under conditions of extreme tension within civil society? Has the state lost its fucking mind? Customs should have been sent in full to the front on the first day of the war, so they could have all perished there. Or at least fired, for goodness’ sake.
In short, I am far from admiring the actions of the current Ukrainian leadership. It could destroy Putin’s occupiers no less effectively while not tyrannizing its own people. This would serve as a much more weighty moral example to the world than the president keeping an automatic rifle at his workplace. Look, Lukashenko also posed with an automatic rifle; some knight he is.
