The Ukrainian People Are Fighting For Their Survival... Against Ukraine

Good day, Aontacht readers,

And firstly, let me start with a personal note, because this article is one I have been sitting on for a long time, and it deserves honesty before anything else. I knew it would be controversial. I knew it would anger some of my readers. I knew, even, that some might unsubscribe. That is not a comfortable thing to know. But it is not my job to tell people what they want to hear, or to confirm beliefs they already hold. My job is to tell the truth as I see it, based on the evidence I have gathered.

About five years ago, when this war evolved from a civil war in Ukraine into its full-scale form, I was completely misinformed about the state of Empire, by default, like most Europeans. I was entirely on Ukraine’s side. I spent time online calling people Russian propagandists. I bought a Ukraine football shirt, which I used to wear proudly…

…because I knew nothing about Ukraine or Russia beyond what the mainstream Western media had told me. Five years later, my opinion has changed completely, and this was not achieved by any single event but by the process of starting the spectacle and researching the Palestinian genocide, Israel, the United States Empire, China, Latin America, and all the things in between. I realised that the same mainstream Western news telling me to support Ukraine wholeheartedly was the same news that told me there was no genocide in Palestine. The same news that lied to me about China, Venezuela, and Cuba. That is when I began to do my own research.

What I found was that Westerners are not given the full story about Ukraine and Russia at all. We are never told about the civil war that began in 2014 with the mistreatment of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east, and the conflict that led to 14,000 of them being killed by Kyiv. We are never told the truth about the Western-backed Maidan coup that placed Ukraine under the control of the US and EU. We are never shown anything about what is happening inside Ukraine right now, to the Ukrainian people themselves. We are simply fed propaganda in order to keep the war machine running.

This article is for those who are willing to question what they have been told. I am the same person who brought you the unfiltered news about Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and China and everything else we’ve covered. I have no intention of lying to you. I also have no intention of publishing articles that confirm Western propaganda. the spectacle is not a place to reinforce it, but to dismantle it. And I will consistently remind you that the same news outlets and commentators pushing ‘Slava Ukraini’ are the very same ones that told you not to believe your eyes in Gaza and which continue to give platforms to Israeli genocidaires. Today is Ukrainian Independence Day. It seems a fitting moment to speak honestly about a country the West claims to love and has systematically destroyed.

The Hunt For Bodies

Five years into a war that has consumed hundreds of thousands of lives, Ukraine has completely run out of volunteers.

The patriotic fervour of 2022, the long queues at recruitment centres, the flags waved at train stations, the steel resolve of a nation under siege, has now all but evaporated. What remains is a country that has been stripped of its men, and a state that has resorted to increasingly desperate and brutal measures to find more bodies to send to the front line.

The numbers tell a devastating story. In 2023, Ukraine lost an estimated 140,000 soldiers killed or seriously wounded. For 2025 alone, the toll reportedly reached nearly 500,000. While precise figures cannot be independently verified given the fog of war, the scale of Ukraine’s manpower crisis is not in dispute — the Kyiv Independent, hardly a Kremlin mouthpiece, has confirmed that Ukraine’s military faces a ‘growing need to replenish fighting units, build reserves, and allow existing soldiers to rotate off the front line,’ and that conscription has become the country’s most contentious domestic issue. Ukrainian lawmaker Vadim Ivchenko admitted in March 2026 that fewer than 10% of new recruits join voluntarily, making forced conscription, in his own words, ‘impossible to abandon.’

The state’s response has been to transform the conscription system into a kidnapping operation. Ukrainian men aged 25 to 60 are now subject to conscription under martial law and forbidden from escaping the country. Because they cannot be persuaded to join, they are simply taken.

This practice has now acquired its own grim name, ‘busification,’ after the minibuses used by conscription squads to kidnap unwilling conscripts. The website busification.org/en has archived nearly 10,000 clips of Ukrainian civilians documenting the human rights violations they are witnessing and experiencing. What follows in this article is drawn from a miniscule fraction of them, and I will include video throughout this article, but I want you to understand that every clip I show you represents dozens you will never see.

In Lviv, draft enforcers were filmed dragging a man from a kindergarten and shoving him into a black SUV while children looked on. A woman’s voice is heard off-screen: ‘Please stop, there are children here.’ The press gang ignored her. In Kyiv, a man who supported Ukraine’s fight but did not want to be sent to the front line, was ambushed outside his home. Speaking with Al Jazeera, he said:

‘They told me to mute my phone and hand it over, The guard said, don’t push me to use physical methods on you. Give it to me now.’

He was held in a room with barred windows, a bucket of cold pasta, and no way to contact the outside world before being transferred to a recruitment centre he described as operating more like a prison than a military facility. In Odessa, they tried to smoke a man out of his car through the crack of his car door because he refused to comply.

As I said, there are thousands upon thousands of these videos and you can see them all at busification.org/en but I will share a just a few here to drive my point home:

I think that that is enough of those videos for this article but please remember that this is just eight videos of approximately 10,000 which have been archived at www.busification.org/en.

This is not some kind of one off anomaly and it's certainly not Russian propaganda which is what a lot of people would tell you— it is simply everyday life in Ukraine at the moment.

And then what happens once they are abducted? The ‘recruits’ are held in facilities that operate more like holding pens than barracks, mistreated, often for days, before being sent to the front. Soldiers are told by men with guns that they will be shot if they attempt to desert.

The result is a military force composed largely of men who did not choose to be there, handcuffed on buses to the front line, fighting a war they did not ask for.

Oh yes. you didn't misread. These men are quite literally handcuffed as they are being transported to make sure that they don't desert or escape.

The conditions are so intolerable even that hundreds of Ukrainians have deserted while undergoing military training in Germany — more than 80 in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt alone recently, with the total across Germany running into the hundreds. Under Ukrainian law, these men face up to twelve years in prison if apprehended. They fled anyway. The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Michael O’Flaherty, has expressed ‘serious concerns’ about ‘systematic and widespread’ abuse by Ukrainian draft officials, including ‘allegations of torture and death.’ Ukraine’s own parliamentary human rights commissioner recorded at least 5,000 complaints about violations by draft officers since the start of 2025.

But here is what the Western media will absolutely not show you, because it disrupts the narrative rather badly. The Ukrainian people are fighting back. Every single day, more videos emerge of civilians intervening in abductions, pulling men free, surrounding conscription vehicles, refusing to let their neighbours be taken. People are coming out to save their men.

A few days ago, two men intervened with a flying kick and pepper spray to prevent a kidnapping in the middle of the night.

The fact that there are men in Ukraine walking around with pepper spray specifically to defend against their own state’s press gangs alone tells you everything you need to know about the situation on the ground. And just last week, a man came out of his house with a pistol and shot a conscription officer who had come for his loved one. Not a Russian soldier. A Ukrainian state official.

This is where this country is in 2026:

And there’s a lot more of that too:

The thing is, when a government has to kidnap its own people to fight its war, and when those people are arming themselves and fighting back against the kidnappers, you do not need a political science degree to understand what that means. They are done. The population is done. And this should surprise absolutely nobody, because the question nobody in the Western media is willing to ask is: what exactly are these people supposed to be fighting for? A corrupt government that abducts them from kindergartens and Sunday mass? An economic system that has done nothing to improve the material conditions of the working class? How many of you reading this could honestly say, hand on heart, that you would fight for your country? Now ask yourself why on earth these people should fight for a government that treats them like cattle.

As if all of this were not enough, the Kyiv Independent has reported that Ukraine is now preparing to radicalise the conscription process even further in response to what it describes as a catastrophic manpower crisis. Likely measures include lowering the draft age to 18 and beginning to conscript women.

Roman Kostenko, secretary of Ukraine’s parliamentary defence committee, confirmed on the 22nd of August that ‘radical’ changes to the mobilisation system are being prepared, and that financial incentives have failed to increase recruitment, so the state is falling back on coercion. The direction of travel is terrifying.

The Silencing Of A Nation

Unfortunately, the Ukrainian people are not allowed to speak openly about any of this, which is why most of you are reading it here rather than in the Guardian or on the BBC. The repression is covered up by a Western media apparatus with a vested interest in maintaining the fiction of a plucky, democratic underdog fighting for its survival, and it is almost entirely absent from the conversation that Western audiences are permitted to have about this war.

The reality is that Ukraine in 2026 is not a functioning democracy. It is a country where freedom of speech has been systematically dismantled, where political opposition has been criminalised, and where the press exists only at the pleasure of the state. This did not begin with the full-scale invasion in 2022. It began in 2014, with the Western-backed Maidan coup that installed a new government and the subsequent banning of left-wing parties and organisations deemed sympathetic to Russia. In 2015, laws were passed effectively outlawing the Communist Party and banning Soviet symbols. In 2018, legislation criminalised the ‘justification’ of what Ukraine calls Russian aggression, a broad formulation that can be applied to almost any criticism of the government really…and has. By 2022, martial law provided the perfect cover for the final, comprehensive crackdown on what remained of civil society.

A close look at the media in Ukraine shows most of the major Ukrainian publications are now so thoroughly compromised that they no longer publish articles critical of the government. Ukrainska Pravda, which once was a beacon of independent journalism within Ukraine, still exists, but it no longer does what independent journalism is supposed to do. It feels like critical pieces are quietly edited before publication or retracted afterwards. The journalists understand what happens to those who step out of line. The English-language publications that Western readers consume as reliable sources — the Kyiv Independent, most prominently — are not as independent as they seem. Most of what they publish is what the government wants published. And United24, the platform that Western celebrities have used to fundraise for Ukraine, was literally founded by Zelensky. People share its articles as though its news.

It’s not. It’s state propaganda, and they’re not even discreet about it.

It’s not surprising though, the punishment for dissent has been brutal. Bogdan Syrotiuk is a socialist writer who was critical of both Zelensky and Putin in his work, treating both as corrupt authoritarians waging a war that served their own interests rather than those of the Ukrainian people. He was not a Russian propagandist. He was a left-wing critic of both sides, which in the binary world of wartime Ukraine is an unforgivable sin. Recently, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on charges of ‘justifying Russian aggression’ and has been in solitary confinement ever since.

And then there is the case of Gonzalo Lira, a Chilean-American writer and journalist living in Ukraine who became a vocal critic of the Maidan coup and Zelensky. He was arrested in May 2023, detained for months, placed under house arrest, and subjected to conditions that deteriorated severely. By the end of the year, he was dead. The Ukrainian state refuses to comment on the circumstances of his death. His family has been denied answers. Lira was a polarising figure, someone with whom I would disagree on many things, but he was a journalist, a critic of power, and he was killed for it. If this had happened in Russia, or China, or Iran, the Western media would have been screaming about it for months. Because it happened in Ukraine, it has been met with silence.

The repression extends well beyond individual journalists. Ukraine’s state security service has been granted sweeping powers of detention without due process. Left-wing parties are banned. Trade unions are suppressed. A law passed in 2023 criminalises ‘attempts to incite destabilisation,’ and it has been used against activists, trade unionists, and anyone who organises independently of the state. The Ukraine Labour Initiative has documented cases of working-class Ukrainians being arrested for resisting conscription, not because they were pro-Russian, but because they opposed being forced into a war they did not support. These are not political activists. They are ordinary people who have had enough.

And elections. Let us talk about elections, because it is a point that slips past almost entirely without comment in Western coverage. Ukraine has not held an election since the war began, and Zelensky’s term has technically expired. The justification offered is that the constitution does not permit elections during wartime. This would be more persuasive if the Ukrainian constitution were treated as a sacred document in other respects, but it is rather difficult to make that argument about a country whose current government came to power through a coup that unconstitutionally removed a democratically elected president a decade ago. Constitutions can be amended. The question of whether they should be is a political one, not a constitutional one, and the answer the Ukrainian government has settled on is that the people should not be given the opportunity to vote for politicians who have understood the writing on the wall and who might be less amenable to fighting this war to the last man.

A Country Disappearing

The manpower crisis and the political repression are symptoms of something deeper and more existential: Ukraine is running out of people, and the scale of the demographic collapse is so staggering that, if it were any other country, it would be front-page news across the world.

According to Ukraine’s Social Policy Minister Denys Uliutin, only 22 to 25 million people currently live in territory under Kyiv’s control. At independence in 1991, the population was 52 million. A generation later, more than half the country’s people have gone, through annexation, through the millions who fled to Russia (funnily enough) or to European countries, and of course, through the deaths of men being sent to a front line they were not given the choice to avoid. In the first half of 2026, 73,292 children were born in Ukraine. Over the same period, 259,853 people died. Four deaths for every birth. A year ago the ratio was three to one. Ukrainska Pravda described the country as ‘slowly turning into a country of the dead.’ Yulia Mendel, Zelensky’s own former press secretary, laid out the picture plainly on this Independence Day: more than half the remaining population are pensioners or people with disabilities, and the number of working-age citizens does not exceed ten million.

This is not a country that can sustain a war effort. This is a country that is disappearing.

The economic picture is equally grim. Ukraine’s agricultural sector, the backbone of its economy, is in freefall. Russian attacks on shipping have brought the ports of Odessa to a near-standstill, halting the vast majority of agricultural exports. Farmers have harvested more than 28 million tons of grain that cannot be sold, with domestic prices for food-grade wheat falling by 30 to 35%. Annual losses from unsold agricultural produce are estimated at approximately $20.5 billion. Meanwhile, grocery shelves in Kyiv are emptying, missile strikes on distribution centres have disrupted food supplies, and staples like barley, buckwheat, and sugar are disappearing from supermarkets. This is not a country that is winning. This is a country being consumed by a war it can no longer afford.

A Lord Ashcroft poll from May 2026 found that three-quarters of Ukrainians now expect a diplomatic rather than a military solution to the war. More than seven in ten said that Russian withdrawal in return for a commitment not to join NATO was either acceptable or worth considering. A majority said a permanent ceasefire along the current front line was at least worth considering. The people have already made their decision. They are done.

And yet, the war continues. NATO is planning to demand each member state transfer €70 billion for 2026 and 2027 to sustain it. The US has largely withdrawn from financing. Germany has risen to become the largest contributor. Ukraine is being used as a testing ground for NATO’s military-industrial ambitions, its forces deployed to generate combat experience with drones and tactics that can then be shared with other NATO members. This is, in the clearest possible terms, a proxy war, and the proxy is being destroyed.

Before someone else asks in the comments, let me answer a question that a certain portion of my readership will already be formulating: ‘What would you rather Ukraine do, Deaglan? Simply lie down and let Russia win?’

Two things. First: Russia has already won, in the sense that there is no realistic path to changing the trajectory of this war without a massive NATO intervention that is not coming. The eastern regions and Crimea are under Russian control and will remain so for the foreseeable future. That is the reality, and no amount of continued slaughter will change it. Second, and more importantly: when you ask what Ukraine should do, what do you mean by Ukraine? Because I define Ukraine as its people. The working-class majority. The 99.9% of the population who make up the country and keep it running. And those people, based on everything I have presented in this article and everything I do not have the space to include, have made it explicitly clear that they are tired of this war and want it brought to a negotiated end, so that the men do not have to worry about being kidnapped from kindergartens and supermarkets and Sunday mass and sent to their deaths in handcuffs.

My suggestion would be simple: hold an election. Allow the people to vote for politicians who have understood the writing on the wall and who might be less completely controlled by the interests of NATO and the Western military-industrial complex. If you tell me the constitution does not allow it, I will refer you to the paragraph above about the Maidan coup, and I will ask you to try again.

Of course, if you define Ukraine as its puppet government, controlled by NATO and kept in place by the same Western powers that benefit from every day this war continues, then yes, they want to keep fighting. It is not their children being sent to die. Zelensky’s children live safely outside Ukraine, as do the children of the vast majority of the Rada. The West is determined to fight Russia until the last Ukrainian. And the Ukrainian people, the real Ukraine, the only Ukraine that matters, have made clear that they are no longer willing to be the last Ukrainian.

And on that thought, I will let you go.

This article was originally published in The Spectacle.