Having spent many months each year in Ukraine in the last three years…I would completely disagree. No people are foolish enough to want the poverty and oppression of Putin’s Russia, let alone the Ukrainians who have consistently voted against their leaders who wanted to kowtow to Moscow.
Completely true for the vast majority of Russian I have talked to…however Ukrainian have a very different view.
Ukrainian wars against Russia go back to before Catherine the Great conquered the Donbas. One merely needs to walk down the streets of major and minor cities of Ukraine to see monuments, old and new, pre-Soviet and post-Soviet to the heroes of the Ukrainian people.
And this war is forging an ever-stronger sense of anti-Russian patriotism even, perhaps especially, in the most war affected regions of Western Ukraine that were the most Russian leaning portions of the country until the predations of Putin’s war against the civilian population.
Yes, in Ukraine the casualties are profoundly deep. Twice now the government has lowered the age of the draft. As in unlike the US draft experience culling the young, the Ukrainian draft started with older men. Now I think the age of the draft has been lowered to age 25.
And yet the Ukrainian military has more volunteers that it can use…an odd mix. Drafting men at a younger and younger age while turning away volunteers…because if you volunteer you get to designate to a certain extent where you serve. The AI and drone operator volunteers are full to overflowing. The infantry, armor, and artillery are filled with draftees. and the physical standards or gradually being lowered. I have met Ukrainian men in Europe who were allowed to leave because they were deemed unfit for service who dare not go back even for family events because they would now be considered acceptable.
So far as I am aware Macron is the only EU leader who has openly stated his willingness to send boots on the ground while they are needed in the current circumstance. He has backed off now as the efforts seem to be more configuring the EU force that will be in place once the peace is secured.
I have met volunteers from many countries who are volunteering for their various reasons. Not so many now as two years ago, let alone three years ago.
The media depending on the source is all over the place. War is a fog and modern media and its massive inputs from
governments and
individuals
and of course corporations
each with their own various agendas
makes for more of a fog than in days of old.
My general rule of thumb is that when Russian and Ukrainian sources agree on an event, the details of the event are somewhere in between the specific facts being claimed.
US and UK, well and the five eyes alliance and its various collaborators are full of propaganda on the day to day, though the broader more strategic reports tend to be as reliable as any forecasting in the fog that is war can be.
It is Russia that does not want peace, not the Ukrainians.
Just as the case with Israel, when the aggressors stop the war will stop…Russia is the aggressor Ukraine knows it is in trouble without EU and US support.
And the longer the war has gone on the more important the EU support has become.
Trump’s shenanigans, or whatever you choose to call his bringing Z publicly to heel does nothing re getting Putin to stop his aggression…If Trump’s vaunted negotiation skills were up to the task Trumps first attempts at peace shortly after Jan 20th would have been more effectual.
And Zelensky is a true patriot, like his people caught in a border war that only Russia wanted; well maybe some warmongers in the swamp of DC did as well.
