It would appear Ukrainian men are no longer willing to be conscripted and fed into the maw of the Russian military machine:
A senior recruitment officer has reportedly been killed in a car explosion in Ukraine’s Odessa Region on Friday, according to police and local media reports.
Investigators suspect the blast was intentional and may have been triggered remotely. Odessa regional police confirmed one fatality and said an investigation is under way, but did not name the person who was killed when a vehicle exploded in a village in Berezovsky District.
Law enforcement sources cited by local media said that the vehicle belonged to a local draft office. The Southern Courier named the victim as Colonel Oleg Nomerovsky, a top official at a regional military recruitment center.
While it could have been Russian intelligence behind the assassination, the fact that it was a car bomb and not a missile strike tends to indicate disaffected Ukrainians or Novyrussian rebels were responsible. To be honest, I’m a little surprised it has taken this long for the Ukrainian resistance to the draft to become violent, as it’s obviously a lot safer to fight rear-echelon UFA recruiters than frontline Russian troops.
But I suppose it takes an amount of time and a considerable amount of counternarrative information to eliminate the lasting effects of a relentless propaganda campaign, especially in the minds of naturally patriotic young men. I doubt it would take nearly as long for similar resistance to appear if the British or German governments were foolish enough to attempt to impose a draft on the very sort of young nationalists they’ve been persecuting for years in the name of diversity, immigration, and inclusion.
Regardless, this is another sign that the UFA’s will to resist Russia is crumbling, and that the rapid advance phase across the next six provinces expected this summer has likely already begun.