OPINION
The first casualty of war, the saying goes, is truth. The Ukraine war is proving that old adage in spades.
Right from the start, we in the West have been subjected to a tsunami of propaganda masquerading as truth (as, no doubt, are Russian news-consumers). From the imaginary “Ghost of Kyiv”, to the narrative of “defending freedom and democracy” (anyone who swallows that whopper has clearly not paid the least attentions to Zelensky’s authoritarian rule, before or during the war).
Then there’s the narrative of ‘brave Ukrainians lining up to defend their country against the evil Russkies’, while Big Bad Vlad, we are told, has to drag reluctant Russians off the streets to go off and die.
No doubt there’s some truth to the latter claim, but, as it turns out, it’s every bit as true of corrupt oligarch Zelensky.
An American who walked for 20 hours with thousands of Ukrainian refugees has revealed how fighting-age men were dragged from their screaming families to join the increasingly vain fight against Russia.
This was, it should be pointed out, back in the earliest days of the war, when we were bombarded with propaganda stories that even Ukrainian supermodels were volunteering to fight.
The reality, in fact, was that a great many Ukrainians had cold feet, as much as any Russian conscript.
Manny Marrotta, 25, from Pennsylvania, said […] “It was about 10, 15 kilometres from the border and Ukrainian army soldiers started coming out onto the streets with speakers, announcing ‘no Ukrainian man aged 18 to 60 is allowed to leave the country – you must go east and fight’.
“They were saying, ‘say goodbye to your girlfriend, to your wife, say goodbye to your mothers and daughters, you’re going east’.”
“I started seeing these surreal scenes of fathers saying, ‘don’t want to leave my family’, and Ukrainian soldiers yanking them away … Mothers were protesting, they were screaming: ‘Why are you doing this?’ […]
“When I got to the border, I made friends with this 18-year-old Ukrainian kid … they conscripted him on the spot, it was just very brutal to see the terror in his eyes knowing he was going to go east and fight the Russians.”
Metro
Well, that didn’t fit the narrative.
It still doesn’t.
This, just days ago:
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has decried corrupt medical exemptions that have enabled people to avoid military service, saying the system was subject to bribes and mass departures abroad.
Mass departures? And here we were, being told that Ukrainians were champing at the bit to go and fight the wicked Russkies.
Zelenskiy said the National Security and Defence Council had considered data showing the extent of false exemptions, bribe-taking and flight abroad since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. The investigation of dubious medical exemptions was still being conducted, he said.
“There are examples of regions where the number of exemptions from military service due to medical commission decisions has increased tenfold since February last year,” Zelenskiy said on Wednesday in his nightly video address.
Imagine the propaganda fodder Western media would make of Putin making such an admission.
It turns out that a great many fighting-age Ukrainians – “at least thousands of individuals”, in Zelensky’s own words – are willing to pay a good deal of money to not fight the Russians.
He said the investigation had exposed corrupt practices in different regions and by officials in different positions, involving bribes ranging from $3,000 to $15,000 […]
Zelenskiy this month dismissed all the heads of Ukraine’s regional army recruitment centres.
The Guardian
Guess they weren’t keeping up their dragging-boys-off-the-street quotas.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a great many Ukrainians aren’t giving all to fight the invasion. The Azov Battalion, for one, fought to practically the last man in Mariupol… but, oops, the Western media doesn’t like to talk about them.
But it does mean that yet another propaganda narrative is busted.
(Here’s another: the majority of Russians still support the war, and twice as many “firmly” support it as oppose it.)
The sheer volume of lies and propaganda – on both sides – is yet another reason why we should be keeping firmly out of this internecine squabble between former Soviet provinces, which the Biden administration has shamelessly stoked into a proxy war.
That so many on both sides don’t wish to fight and die is all the more reason to encourage peace talks, rather than keeping the war going endlessly to fatten the bank accounts of the military-industrial complex.