What should have been a tragic, local war was inflated into a grand moral crusade. Years later, Europe is poorer, Russia is more dangerous, Ukraine lies shattered, and millions are dead, wounded, displaced or bereaved. The promises of victory now echo across graveyards and ruins. A generation has been consumed by a war that neither side could decisively win. Shame on those who launched it, and shame on those who prolonged it. Yet for many in the West, support for the war required little more than a flag emoji, a slogan, and the comforting certainty of being on the right side of history. While they collected social approval and moral self-satisfaction, others paid the real cost: their limbs, their homes, their futures, and their lives. History may yet conclude that the easiest sacrifice made during this war was someone else's. https://archive.ph/lD2pL Ukraine’s military losses remain a closely guarded military secret. But what is no secret to Ukrainian men of military age is that the state’s recruiting officers will stop at nothing to press-gang new recruits. Videos posted on Ukrainian social media daily show vans of officers grabbing men from the counters of fast-food outlets, from inside factories and in parks while they are walking their dogs. Often these operations involve desperate fights, with passers-by frequently intervening to attack the would-be recruiters. Forced recruitment – known as ‘busification’ – has become a major source of discontent, especially as evidence emerges of large-scale, systematic extortion of cash in exchange for release back into civilian society, often after brutal beatings.
