The New York Times Confirmed That Ukrainians Are Losing Their Military Confidence

The reader shouldn’t forget that the insight shared in this analysis is gleaned from the New York Times' own reporting, which can’t realistically be described as “Russian propaganda”. If anything, the New York Times is more than likely covering up exactly how bad everything has gotten in Ukraine nowadays, which suggests that the situation is far worse than even its sharpest critics imagine.

The New York Times (NYT) published a piece on Monday titled “As Ukraine signs up soldiers, questions arise about how it chooses”, which is paywalled but can be read in full for free here. The gist is that the military has aggressively stepped up its recruitment across the remnants of this former Soviet Republic in a desperate drive to replenish many of its highly trained soldiers that it’s already lost thus far (per prior reporting from the NYT last month). According to the latest report, recruiters have even gone as far as to allegedly coerce untrained men into joining the armed forces while inexplicably ignoring those experienced and motivated ones who’ve tried to volunteer. The NYT also cites a military official who warned that these new heavy-handed tactics have demoralized their rank and file.

Seeing as how the NYT is one of the world’s most well-known US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets and can’t by any stretch of the imagination be described as so-called “Russian propaganda”, its report should be considered an accurate reflection of reality in modern-day Ukraine. This realization should in turn prompt some questions about what exactly has been going on there in recent weeks for this disturbing development to have even happened at all, which contradicts a lot of what the MSM had previously reported about its fighters supposedly having “superhuman morale”. The truth, as it’s always been, is that Ukraine’s been misrepresented from the get-go as part of the ongoing information warfare campaign against Russia and that everything isn’t as the Western public has been led to believe.

It's already common knowledge even among the most passionate pro-Ukrainian voices that hoaxes like Snake Island and the Ghost of Kiev had to be concocted purely for the purpose of artificially manufacturing morale among members of that society otherwise there were serious concerns that few would have agreed to fight at all. Now that the fake news has worn off, reality is setting in, and recruiters are desperate to replenish their ranks after losing thousands of soldiers this summer thus far in the Battle for Donbass. Ukrainians had been fed an incessant stream of so-called “victory porn” up until Russia liberated the entirety of the Lugansk People’s Republic by freeing Lisichansk, which they now know was nothing but information warfare waged against them by their own rulers.

This explains the reluctance among many to risk their lives fighting for what they’ve rightly begun to conclude is a lost cause: removing all Russian forces from Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders, which includes not just Donbass but also Crimea. In response, the military has aggressively begun to hunt for new recruits and coerce them into joining through what the NYT’s sources argue are illegal subpoenas in many cases. While it remains unknown why they allegedly turn away those experienced and motivated men who’ve tried to volunteer, this could be attributed to a combination of typical bureaucratic dysfunction as well as a possibly cynical desire to only throw the weakest citizens into the Donbass grinder while preserving the comparatively better ones for defending areas further inland if need be.

From the perspective of the average Ukrainian military-age male who isn’t already fighting on the front lines and also of course doesn’t want to, it seems as though their state is now waging war against them to an extent by hunting their fellows all throughout the country. The authorities are doing this because they’re losing the conflict despite having getting their people’s hopes up that Western heavy weapons would supposedly finally turn the tide. That obviously hasn’t happened, though, which is why they need more meat to urgently throw into the grinder so as to slow the Russia-led Allied advance. Put simply, inexperienced and demoralized men – including alcoholics according to the NYT – are being sent to die in a desperate bid for Kiev to buy time in the hopes that “wunderwaffen” will finally help them win.

All of this is unsustainable, but that doesn’t mean that Kiev’s forces are going to collapse any day now, even though it could still happen. Rather, this crumbling former Soviet Republic is turning into a dystopian military dictatorship as the armed forces exert full control over the populace, the weakest members of which they’re throwing into the meat grinder in order for the elite to save their own skin for a little while longer. The reader shouldn’t forget that the insight shared in this analysis is gleaned from the NYT’s own reporting, which once again can’t realistically be described as “Russian propaganda”. If anything, the NYT is more than likely covering up exactly how bad everything has gotten in Ukraine nowadays, which suggests that the situation is far worse than even its sharpest critics imagine.