In April 2014, when poorly disguised Russian forces started “covertly” seizing administrative buildings in the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the reaction from Kyiv was underwhelming. After years of corruption and mismanagement, the official Ukrainian military was not prepared to defend its country, not even against the rag-tag invading force of FSB Colonel Igor Ghirkin (a.k.a ‘Strelkov’).
However, Ukrainian volunteer battalions, staffed by men and women from their country’s increasingly self-sufficient civil society, were prepared to meet the challenge, quickly pushing Strelkov’s “government” out of its base in the city of Sloviansk and taking control of Donetsk International Airport.
In September of that year, as invading forces again began attacking the no-longer-world-class terminal buildings, the volunteer defenders determined a tongue-in-cheek means of determining Russian-speaking friend from Russian-speaking foe: “‘anyone who possessed two university degrees must be a Ukrainian defender, while anyone who had served two prison terms could only
By 2022, when Russia openly launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s military had already undergone eight years of steady improvements, building up a force of over 200,000. These professional soldiers were quickly supplemented by a similar number of new volunteers, many of whom closed their laptops for the last time to pick up a rifle for the first time.
Russian professionals did not react in a similar way. Despite domestic propaganda claiming that the “Collective West” is waging a proxy war of annihilation against them, instead of picking up a rifle hundreds of thousands of educated Russian professionals have packed up their laptops and fled the country. In their place, the Russian state has largely sent economically disadvantaged provincial men to fill its trenches in Ukraine. Among them are tens of thousands of “soldiers” who were released from prison on the condition that they go and fight in the Kremlin’s war.
While this reality says something very positive about Ukrainian society—and something very negative about the Kremlin leadership—it does create a dilemma for military planners in Kyiv: no matter how positive a casualty ratio Ukrainian forces might achieve, how many petty thieves is one highly motivated computer programmer worth on the battlefield?
Russia’s war of annihilation in Ukraine has driven much of the Moscow and St. Petersburg cultural elite and professional classes abroad. It has decimated Kyiv’s, Lviv’s, Kharkiv’s, and Odesa’s. It’s still not clear which side that trade-off favors.
Source : Newsweek
