Forced Mobilisation: Greed And Cowardice In Ukraine

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Written by Anna Zimmerman for SouthFront

The scenes have become familiar ones. A desperate woman, shrieking in her anguish, grapples the burly man with the impassive face, whilst her husband or son or brother cowers behind her. Sometimes a crowd of women try to protect one man, pushing and pummelling the well-fed, well-paid officers whose job protects them from the death or mutilation they decree for others. 

Yet although keen observers of the brutal forced mobilisation of soldiers for the Armed Forces of Ukraine are now immured to its harsh realities, fresh videos still have the capacity to shock us. They bring the tragedy of the war home to us like nothing else can, as each episode is a microcosm of the disaster that has befallen an entire nation.

Specifically, they show what can happen when a relatively small minority of radicalised fanatics can condemn to death a much larger group, by hijacking the concentrated bureaucratic and material resources of a modern state. However chaotic and dysfunctional modern Ukraine has become over the last decades, it has still retained enough functionality to coerce its population into fighting a war that, judging by the extreme reluctance to fight, most clearly have no faith in. As the saying goes, there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and unfortunately it is the facility to terrorise people that tends to be the last element to disappear in a failing state. Although the Ukrainian government lacks the ability to completely hide its tracks – videos of forced mobilisation still appear online despite threats to their authors – the population is still sufficiently cowed to keep resistance sporadic and piecemeal, rather than in the large public groups that are needed to seriously challenge the narrative of a united, consenting nation.  The depressing realisation is that there is little indication of any likely change in the near future, and so these videos will keep appearing.

If change ever comes, it will not result from the Ukrainian government or their psychopathic henchmen discovering a conscience. We are used to hearing about the importance of Western funds flooding in to the country – to pay pensions and salaries, to buy the paraphernalia of war, to keep the lights on to any degree – but few people make the connection between forced mobilisation and Western money. Yet ultimately this ability to coerce the people is a function of subsidies coming from the West. The West is not only paying for the arms that maintain the pretence of a viable army, but also the salaries of the armed goons who snatch men from their grieving families. Any coercive state, and the Ukrainian state is by any measure entirely coercive, relies on paid thugs to enforce its will. Those familiar with the history of the Battle for Berlin will remember how, even as the Red Army was storming the streets, Nazi enforcers were still hunting down recalcitrant citizens to string them up from lampposts – and no doubt, to loot their homes. It is only when there is no more state money, and nothing more to loot, that the thugs drift away.

Every now and then hints emerge about the financial corruption that fuels the mobilisation process. The most reliable and revealing come from the mouths of the enforcers themselves – those who stress their own ideological ‘purity’ by complaining about the venality of their colleagues. A recent example was an interview given by the Deputy Brigade Commander of the 68^th Brigade, a man with the call sign ‘Yavir’. Yavir is one of a number of Ukrainian soldiers who have been making public threats of the likelihood that every Ukrainian adult male will ultimately be called up. In the interview, he complained how TCC enforcers were indiscriminately rounding up men purely to fulfil their quotas, whilst at the same time reassuring the men that the chances were that they would not be deemed fit enough to fight. “The men say that in the TCC they are told: “Keep quiet, you will be released there, we need to fulfill the plan.””

What the enforcers ultimately share is not just moral bankruptcy and greed, but also cowardice. How does one man become an enforcer, and another enter the trenches? The distinguishing factor is clearly the “ideological purity” referred to above. Only the true believers can be trusted to staff the blocking battalions that shoot panicking soldiers as they try to flee the front, or to be impassive in the face of the distress of the women losing their loved ones. On the few occasions when the most famous fanatics have ended up on the front lines, their behaviour has been less than heroic, such as the Azovs of Azovstal, who spent a lot of time bragging online, but surrendered en masse, or the reconstituted Azovs of the 3^rd Separate Assault Brigade, who proved a damp squib at Avdeevka.

So the paradox is that it is the soldiers who claim to want to fight the war who rarely fight the war, but spend much of their time feathering their own nests and hobnobbing with Western elites.  We can only hope that when the history of this shameful war is finally written, due attention will be paid to the political economy of forced mobilisation, which no doubt now constitutes a thriving subsection of the collapsing overall economy.

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