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 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
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.
