Rift between allies emerges after Washington suggested teenagers join the war amid Ukrainian demands for more US aid.
  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1241·
    15 days ago

    “I would choose to be shot to death right here, in Kyiv instead of going to the frontline,” Serhiy, a 17-year-old high school graduate, told Al Jazeera. “I wouldn’t be able to raise my hand at the people of my blood.”

    He cited the customs of Cossacks, a medieval caste of frontier warriors in what is now central Ukraine who formed quasi-democratic communities and combined nomadic cavalry tactics with firearms.

    “Our forefathers, Cossacks, didn’t allow a man who had no children, no heirs, to go to war,” Serhiy said. “I would have done the same. If there are no people, who the hell needs this land?”

    Finance capitalism, kid. Finance capitalism wants your land.

    Nice that there are kids who haven’t bought in to the “russians are orcs” ukronazi bullshit.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      731·
      15 days ago

      How fucked is it that NATO’s strategy to conquer Ukraine and steal it’s land and riches is to create a war, send a half million Ukrainians to die against their own cousins, finance the war, and then demand everything of value Ukraine has left as repayment?

      And now that it’s looking like there may not be a ukraine to pay the war debt NATO is toying with the idea of taking things nuclear and just ending the world entire instead of capitulating and writing off some paltry amount of debt.

  • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    81·
    15 days ago

    I told my lib colleague this entire time that the global South are better off allying with China than America and he scoffed at the idea for quite a while; the genocide in Palestine though really opened his eyes and he’s beginning to realize regardless of what he thinks of China (he’s still a lib), they are definitely better friends to countries in the global South than the US government.

    • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      61·
      15 days ago

      will it be enough?

      Europe is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle, and the garden must make sure the jungle does not encroach on the garden

      -Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief

      It’s not a matter of ‘is racism against brown people enough’, it’s a matter of when do they come back down to planet earth.

      • Grapho@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        14 days ago

        Until it ain’t. Even Mexico seems to be angling to pivot to BRICS as soon as a chance is presented.

  • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    53·
    15 days ago

    Some things are just impossible to spin. Having to lower conscription to 18 is one of those. You can’t pretend that Russia is losing 10 people to every Ukrainian at that point or that Ukraine has no casualties. The visceral reaction to kids being sent to war overrules everything else, and then you start realizing that the older men got no training whatsoever either.

      • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        14 days ago

        I meant spin mostly for foreign audiences, right. The euro-american NATOist who feels very strongly about the war is just a coward several million steps removed from it all. Whereas your family is in the thick of it. At the very least they are trying to survive mentally, and are invested in the war in a much more visceral way. Their rationalizations are much more powerfully built and that’s without even considering, as you mentioned, the ethnonationalist side of it all.

      • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        14 days ago

        Oh, they have. On reddit I’ve seen NAFO posters continuously talk about how the real problem is that Ukraine was never on conscription and never actually mobilized. Which is insane in the face of the news piece. But rather than question those assertions, the system just overwhelms them with posts of people talking about how 18yos are children, the war must be stopped and things must be collapsing. It’s as if reality kicked the propagandist out of their soapbox.