Western allies receive increasingly ‘sobering’ updates on Ukraine’s counteroffensive
Western allies receive increasingly ‘sobering’ updates on Ukraine’s counteroffensive
Weeks into Ukraine’s highly anticipated counteroffensive, Western officials describe increasingly “sobering” assessments about Ukrainian forces’ ability to retake significant territory, four senior US and western officials briefed on the latest intelligence told CNN.
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In addition, Western officials say the slow progress has exposed the difficulty of transforming Ukrainian forces into combined mechanized fighting units, sometimes with as few as eight weeks of training on western-supplied tanks and other new weapons systems.
I'm not well versed in military training but eight weeks seems like an incredibly short time?
They're basically kidnapping people off the street and throwing them into combat as cannon fodder. Any regime that would do this to their own people is absolutely deplorable. Western values on full display here.
Conscription in the framework of modern warframe makes increasingly little sense to me. It's always been a pretty terrible thing, but one could argue that throwing a pike in the hands of a farmer and pointing them at the enemy had some degree of success. There was definitely a period of history where having more warm bodies than the other side was extremely important.
These days, so much of warfare is conducted without even seeing your enemy, I am not sure how much it accomplishes. Having one more guy on the front lines to get hit by a mortar doesn't do much, and you probably aren't putting conscripts on roles like drone operator or artillery from my understanding. Having trained soldiers seems increasingly more important than having more soldiers.
It doesn't matter how much money you spend on giving fancy gear to your military if the military is comprised of civilians who have no idea how to use them.
Yeah, it's a desperate tactic and the fact that they're doing this clearly shows that the war was lost a long time ago.
They're even collecting people with severe mental and bodily disabilities by now but I guess for most that's "just Russian propaganda talking points" despite the many videos circulating.
Conscription and full mobilization in wartime is not really a western thing though and not really the same as kidnapping. This coming from the point of someone hating the idea of even having a military, narrowly evading conscription myself a few years ago. If you do have some other sources for your claim I would be happy to take a look at them.
I mean there are tons of videos of literal kidnapping where people are grabbed of the street kicking and screaming. Here's a whole article on the subject https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/07/hxfo-j07.html
Literally kidnapping means
to steal, carry off, or abduct by force or fraud, especially for use as a hostage or to extract ransom
making the usage of it in terms of illegal mobilization seem a bit disingenuous. Not to say that is not problematic, but my main point was that illegal detention of people for use as soldiers in war is hardly unique to western countries nor Ukraine in this conflict. You, and the article, can easily make this point without misrepresenting the facts.
to steal, carry off, or abduct by force or fraud
When you show up as a representative of the military to steal someone from their life and throw them into a meat grinder, they don't come with you because they're super stoked to die. They come with you because if they don't, the threat is implicit.
Sure, but you can't ignore the other half of the definition. It is the same with wrongful incarceration: checks some of the boxes but is not really kidnapping. Still the main point is also ignored regarding the uniqueness of the situation: It is not a special case by any means.
the other half of the definition
There is no other half of the definition, because there is no "and". It doesn't say to steal, carry off, and abduct by force and fraud. I don't really see any justification to say this isn't kidnapping, a guy walking up to you at random, unexpectedly, and then using the threat of physical or carceral force to abduct you to the front lines of a doomed war. I would say why split hairs here, but tbh I don't even understand what hair you're trying to split
The problem is rhetoric matters, and kidnapping implies abduction for the purpose of gaining claims, money or exercising terror. Lemmygrad is too stuffed with people using rhetoric that in turn allows them to react with hateful comments. That is why I want to split hairs. We all know what kidnapping means and what context it is usually used for, but you guys really want to use the term even though a better fit is just the plain truth that they are doing illegal and forceful recruiting. The reason you want to do this is to call Ukraine and the West special in this regard, which is not truthful, showing why rhetoric matters.
Physically abducting people against their will is literally what they're doing right now. The only one misrepresenting facts here is you.
Sorry man, but we both know there is a distance between "kidnapping people off the street" and illegal procedure in the procurement of soldiers. The martial law, with grounds in the Ukrainian constitution, allows pretty much for conscripting any male within age 18 to 60 something. That the process is not done in due order is concerning, but also to some degree understandable given the circumstances. Do I think they should even be allowed to conscript just about anyone, of course not, but that doesn't make talking about what is actually going on fair game and what you are really saying true. As an addendum I want to say that something being founded in law or not doesn't make it morally right or wrong. Hence the problem is not the distribution of forms nor the method of extracting unwillful populace for war (which is what the article mentions and uses as grounds for it claims of kidnapping), but the almost unbounded conscription itself. This is also why war is terrible, allowing for situations like this, and none should be happy for using Ukrainians or Russians for fighting the West nor anybody else.
There are literal videos of Ukrainians abducting people off the street kicking and screaming. These aren't hard to find. The fact that you just keep pretending this isn't happening shows an incredible amount of intellectual dishonesty on your part.
It is, but NATO is only used to fight poorer 3rd world countries where "random bullshit go" is a strategy that can actually work if you throw enough money at it.
true, but the main reason for such a short training period is the Ukrainian forces are taking on casualties at a rate that is difficult to replace. even now, as Ukrainian forces advance slowly (100 meters per day) while facing minimal Russian resistance (Russian forces are conducting a withdrawal- ceding ground while harrying the attackers as much as possible), Ukraine casualties are 700 per day. casualties were much worse at the beginning of the conflict. they are taking whatever recruits they can get, teaching them enough to operate military equipment and not kill themselves/friendlies, and throwing them in the meat grinder
transforming Ukrainian forces into combined mechanized fighting units
Mechanized units are literally the "Soviet tactics" that pentagon and the journos keep screeching about