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# The Western Left Must Stop Backing Zelensky’s Conscription Machine
- URL: https://aontachtmedia.ie/the-western-left-must-stop-backing-zelenskys-conscription-machine/
- Published: 2026-09-10T10:58:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-10T14:39:46.000Z
- Description: The Western Left must stop backing Zelensky's conscription machine. Ukraine is not a sovereign country. The people of Donbas, terrorised by Kyiv, should be left alone; the real task is decolonising a Brussels-controlled Ukraine from IMF/EU/US rule and its far-right collaborators.
- Author: Ilya Ulyanov
- Tags: Critical Analysis

## **The Start Of The Ukranian-Russian War In 2022**

*Ilya Ulyanov is a member of PBP based in Dublin. He is originally from eastern Ukraine. He is a communist, an anti-colonial Ukrainian nationalist, a borders-realist, an ethical Kantian and a defender of the Ukrainian people from the Western warmongering liberals. "The article reflects a personal position, unfortunately ..., " he says. Read the first part of this article* [*here*](https://aontachtmedia.ie/the-western-left-must-come-to-terms-with-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem)*.*

Lenin is famous for his WWI slogan: “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” We, idiots, managed to turn the civil war into an imperialist one. 

Over the year prior to the invasion Putin was performing military manoeuvres near the Ukrainian borders, together with escalating a diplomatic discourse about the necessity of Minsk implementation as soon as possible. At the same time his attempts to achieve written guarantees of NATO non enlargement with the US, ruled by Russia-hardliner Biden, totally failed. 

In the months prior to the intervention, the West started to urgently arm the Ukrainian army with modern weapons systems, efficient against heavy vehicles. The Ukrainian army was already switching to NATO standards since the 2014 reforms, to be able to be commanded from NATO headquarters using all the technological advancements of its infrastructure. 

Zelensky made clear that he was not going to implement Minsk under pressure, and asked the West for the direct defense of Ukraine in case of a big war. He also threatened to restore Ukrainian nuclear weapons. 

Prior to the intervention Putin was facing a choice: step back, allowing Ukraine to be armed to the extent that any intervention would be impossible, thus showing his own pressure- efforts as a cheap bluff (with the possibility of being involved in the next Donbass campaign of Kiev); or intervene into the frozen Ukrainian civil war trying to achieve government change. 

Time was running out for Putin, and he got into his personal Ukrainian trap set by the US with its suggested goal of ending any EU-Russia economic cooperation. We can assume that he also was encouraged by China, which was interested in the destruction of the American-centric global order, with its American monopoly on invasions without UN mandate (Yugoslavia, Middle East, etc.). 

In February 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine trying to perform government change, most likely replacing Zelensky with Ukrainian opposition politician Medvedchuk, who had been under house arrest in Ukraine since May 2021\. After his main goal failed, Kiev and Moscow promptly started the Istanbul peace negotiations. 

The Istanbul peace project demanded from Ukraine a return to military neutrality and the restoration of the status of the Russian language, as well as the prohibition at constitutional level of the location of Western military bases and weapons in Ukraine; in exchange for this would be the return to Ukraine of all new territories captured by Putin, with the possibility to separately discuss the status of Donbass. 

In April 2022, UK prime minister Boris Johnson arrived in Kiev, proposing to Zelensky to stop negotiations in exchange for weapons and funding from the West for the military restoration of ‘territorial integrity ’. This means that the Donbass and Crimea is to be forcibly reintegrated into Ukraine. 

The visit was a turning point in the breakdown of negotiations, according to the head of the Zelensky faction in parliament, Arakhamia who was head of the Ukrainian Istanbul delegation. In a 2023 interview, he confirmed that the main goal of the Ukrainian delegation was to imitate negotiations to win the time for Western military aid, and stated : “In my opinion, they \[Russians\] truly believed until the very end that they could pressure us into adopting neutrality. This was the most important thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we adopted neutrality, like Finland once did. And if we committed not to join NATO... In fact, this was the key point. (…) When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said we wouldn't sign anything with them at all. And "let's just fight." \[21\] 

![](https://aontachtmedia.ie/content/images/2026/09/colonial.webp)

*Footage of Boris Johnson “accidentally” meeting an actor playing grateful Ukrainian civilian in the restricted government quarter during curfew in spring 2022, shows archetypal colonial image of Ukrainian in western media representation. Ukrainian is tokenised, shown as naive, vulnerable, sincere, emotional, needed to be saved, forever grateful to external force for “protection”. Depiction of natives as loyal objects with excessive unnatural gratefulness perfectly matches with depictions of loyal black people in European colonial propaganda of 19-20 centuries, depicting control and exploitation as protection in the interest of natives.*

Zelensky has abandoned negotiations, preferring the way of Western money and class-based conscriptions. He even formally banned himself from negotiations with Putin by a decree issued on Sept. 30, 2022\. \[22\]

He put the TV channels under State control and optimized the system of State repressions. The famous, now the State TV presenter Natalia Moseichuk said in 2024, addressing conscription critics: 

*“The Security Service of Ukraine will knock on everyone's door. The toy, flower-chocolate period in Ukraine is coming to an end... It’s better to not say nonsense and not to say what harms the State”.* 

## **Military Restoration Of ‘Territorial Integrity’** 

With his very political and potentially legal survival linked to continuation of the war, and his presidential office expired from 2024, Zelensky and the Western warmongering elites (including Michael Martin in his recent Statements in Kiev \[23\]), are still insisting on the military restoration of ‘territorial integrity ’to the 1991 borders, which includes Donbass and Crimea. 

This is obviously unrealistic, unsustainable and not needed for ordinary people in both parts of former Ukraine, who have gone through enough suffering and death. For the large cohorts of people and their families on territories lost by Kiev, it means the possibility of long prison terms as collaborators and property confiscation according to Kiev laws for just keeping their jobs after 2014 (teachers, public sector workers etc). 

In this scenario a sadder prospect awaits all people who were copying the Maidan tactics in the Donbass rebellion. It is also worth stating that Putin’s Russia, which is evidently an authoritarian country and not a picnic of human-rights, in comparison with totalitarian Zelensky’s Ukraine seems almost a liberal democracy, still having open borders and a contract army. 

Additionally, the terror of the Ukrainian army against the Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, that was unnecessary from a military point of view and totally ignored by the Western media’s selective empathy, cannot be compared to the civilian suffering in the Kiev-controlled parts, and has contributed to the extreme hostility of the Donbass population towards Kiev. 

The military crimes of Zelensky included dropping masses of soviet PFM-1 “Flower Petal Mines” from drones onto pedestrian streets of uncontrolled cities, common before the Kiev army was removed from the Donetsk suburbs. In the Ukrainian media a hatemongering discourse, calling for “punishment of Donbass traitors” and openly expressing happiness with the Ukrainian Army terror against the “wrong” civilians, is an important part of war propaganda and emotional mobilization. 

This indicates that the civil war in Ukraine and its senseless hate machine still co-exists as an integral part with the broader inter-imperialist war. 

For the population in what are now effectively the Brussels-controlled territories of Ukraine, ‘territorial integrity’ means further impoverishment, more Nazification, repression and the extermination of anything that looks male - in military attempts with no result guaranteed. 

## **Class-Based Conscription** 

Driving towards the biggest escalation. Zelensky has already excluded HIV, hepatitis, diabetes and moderate visual impairment among many other chronic illnesses and disabilities as the basis for exemption from mobilization. 

The class-based conscriptions of the Zelensky regime are intersecting with regional discrimination, being significantly heavier towards the second-class citizens of Eastern and Southern urban regions while the economically and culturally privileged Kiev and West are targeted moderately. 

Additionally, draft exceptions are widely available both legally and illegally, making the conscriptions a pure working-class extermination. Legally the government has granted exemption for enterprise reservation of managerial staff, etc. It has also been reported that staff of 133 Western-funded NGOs were granted exemptions \[24\]. The whole cast of “Professional Ukrainians” working as the “representatives” of the entire nation as actors in the Western “Stand with Ukraine” show are granted exemptions.

Illegally, all types of exemptions, including the right to leave the country, are available via developed bribes schemes, working over the years with no interruption. The problem is that the average bribe prices exceed five years of the annual salaries of the average worker, and often even the price of the property owned by a household in the South and East. 

Working-class people, trying to leave Ukraine crossing the border on their own, without payment, face one of the most heavily guarded borders, equipped with an innovative system of barriers, thousands of hidden cameras, observation drones and thermal imagers. 

Roughly up to 100 people are estimated by the media to have died: freezing in the mountains of Western Ukraine, drowning in rivers, or being eaten alive by wolves and bears in the forests while crossing the border into the EU. This estimation includes only those corpses identified and reported by the media. People also die in minefields fleeing “democracy” and trying to reach “totalitarian” Belarus. 

There are already several documented cases of Ukrainians being killed by Ukrainian Border Guard gunfire during attempts to cross the border: 24 years old man was shot by Border Guard of Western proxy State in June 2024, 23 year old man was shot in September 2025 and so on – cases openly reported officially \[25\] \[26\]. The official Border Guard statistics have reported in May 2026 68,500 detentions of people trying to flee Ukraine since the 2022 border closures \[27\]. 

A well-developed bribe system is available at Border Guard detention points, allowing release in exchange for bribes that are estimated to exceed annual salaries in Ukraine. Otherwise, these people are handed over directly to Draft Officers and then sent to the frontline - another intimidation tactic of the Zelensky regime directed against the Ukrainian population. 

2 million of Ukrainians are reportedly wanted by the State and hiding from the regime, either inside or outside Ukraine \[28\]. Different forms of grassroots resistance to draft officers becoming a daily norm, including stabbing draft officers to death. Meanwhile, the new bill submitted by the government is awaiting a vote in Parliament proposing to criminalize attempts to leave Ukraine with sentences of 7 to 9 years imprisonment. 

![](https://aontachtmedia.ie/content/images/2026/09/priest.jpeg)

*One of footages published by Borgerguard Service of Ukraine for intimidation purposes depicts Ukrainians caught attempting to cross the border. They were lined up, forced to sing the national anthem, after which a priest preached to them about the gravity of their "sin" against their motherland. Afterwards, they were sent to the military enlistment office for processing.*

Even though wartime casualty estimates are inherently part of the propaganda efforts of both sides, it is becoming increasingly clear that the number of deaths among Ukrainian and Russian forces and civilians is approaching one million, while the total number of casualties is approaching two million. There is no surprise considering that war expanded into the biggest war in Europe since World War 2\. 

## **Class Demographics Of Refugees And Zelensky’s Attempts To Return Them** 

The closed borders and class-based conscriptions play a decisive role in the class demographics of Ukrainian refugees in the EU, affecting the class composition not only among the males, but also women and children - since most people live in families. 

Thus it is no surprise in the first years of war to see Ukrainian middle-class rallies in European capitals demanding more arms. The rallies have decreased after Zelensky started to stretch his hands towards all Ukrainian refugees by calling on the EU governments for deportations of males for the Army’s needs. 

He also calls for the cuts to integration and support programs, for the sake of the population return needed for the “restoration of Ukraine”. He prohibited passport renewals in embassies for Ukrainians without military exemption documents from Ukraine. 

Zelensky’s call was heard by EU leaders. Cuts to integrational supports are being carried out, and Temporary Protection refugees are still living in a State of uncertainty; they are not offered by the host countries schemes for obtaining long-term residency or naturalization in the fifth year of Western “Standing with Ukraine”. 

Moreover, in the summer of 2026 the European Commission decided to exclude Ukrainian “military age” males and people with “military obligations” from the age of 23 to the age of 60 from the right to claim temporary protection in the EU - treating them openly as disposable material in the EU war with Russia until the last Ukrainian – an unprecedented step in the history of refugee policies. 

Note that some people on the Irish left, who afraid to criticize warmongering position of the “neutral” Irish State and its complicity in war, still speak about imaginable Two-Tier system of asylum, shamelessly attacking ordinary people fleeing extermination by United Europe (which includes Ireland) in European war conscription, by repeating mantras about non-existent preferable treatment of Ukrainians by the EU system. 

They are still repeating old mantras, when on gov.ie clearly stated: “Temporary Protection will only be granted to applicants who can demonstrate that they were authorised under Ukrainian law to leave the territory of Ukraine. Applicants must provide acceptable evidence of that authorisation. Applicants who are unable to provide sufficient evidence that they were authorised under Ukrainian law to leave Ukraine may not be eligible for Temporary Protection” \[29\]. 

Thus, a person genuinely in need of protection, fleeing extermination by Ursula, Michael Martin and Co. in Brussels-occupied Ukraine will be refused by the privileged “Two-Tier System” from right of protection and may be deported to be exterminated after 90 days stay in the EU! 

![](https://aontachtmedia.ie/content/images/2026/09/samovar--1-.jpg)

*20 years old Ukrainian that been processed by Biletsky 3rd Army Corps posing in front of Azov symbol Wolfsangel. This is exactly how Ursula, Michael Martin and crazy European liberal pensioners want Ukrainians to look like. Potentially, European youths themselves will soon begin to look like this, as conscriptions back in Germany and Europe is preparing to fight Russia in more open way than it fighting it now, since Ukrainians due to end.*

Additionally, obtaining individual international protection for these people will be complicated because of the difficulty of proving “valid” grounds for protection. Escaping compulsory military service is not, in itself, grounds for protection. More importantly, to prove political/State persecution for asylum cases, Ukrainians are fleeing a country that is considered by the EU to be free and democratic in all main respects, a country with rule of law. We should also remember that the concentration camps of Nazi Germany were regarded by German officials as places with acceptable living standards for Slavic population, and that there were complimentary nazi documentaries about the concentration camps. 

Given the closed border, individuals and families in greater need tend to flee Ukraine with significant delays. Moreover, the performative, privileged support provided during the first months of 2022 to a small proportion of middle-class representatives from, so to speak, Lviv — who were able to free up property for rent for internal refugees — does not amount to any privileged systematic treatment for broader cohorts. On the contrary, the current treatment clearly disadvantages people who are in greater need and do not offer naturalization options as international protection does. 

Right now, Irish immigration officers are checking military documents and the Ukrainian government’s Reserve+ app not only for Ukrainian men, but also for women, claiming protection in Ireland, since certain categories of women are already subject to military registration. Calls for the general mobilisation of women are growing: former Ukrainian Defence Minister Reznikov and former Trump administration special envoy to Ukraine General Kellogg recently spoke publicly in favour of it. And meanwhile, the Irish left is still talking about a “Two-tier system” bullshit. 

Thus, the EU refugee policy reproduces the same hierarchy outside Ukraine that European external rule produces inside Ukraine. And Western solidarity with “Ukraine” is pure class solidarity with their own colonial administration and small comprador class. 

## **Conclusion** 

I want to rephrase the mainstream mantra: 

Ukraine has the right to defend itself—from the EU, the US, NATO, the IMF, the far right, and European public opinion. 

There is no doubt that the average European pensioner-voter, receiving information from newspapers and ready to send all remaining Ukrainians to their deaths to defend his comfort from imaginary Russian threats emerging from his own imbecilic reasoning, is Ukraine\`s biggest geopolitical threat. 

To defend Ukraine from senseless extermination, we must openly support defunding the Zelensky regime; acknowledging the natural territorial changes according to the will of the populations of Donbas and Crimea; cleansing Ukraine of ethnonationalist policies and ethnonationalist criminals; and normalizing relations with Russia. The latter should not be a difficult task, given the cultural similarities between Ukrainians and Russians and their common security interest in eliminating mutual threats. 

On all these demands, some factions of Western far right with its isolationism, has thus far been much more vocal and useful for the real Ukrainian lives, deconstructing liberal mainstream, than the Western left, which has, en masse, opportunistically aligned itself with the liberal mainstream in implicit or explicit support of the war. 

Indeed, so often in debates against the Western elite's vision of Ukraine, Western leftists, while expressing some soft criticism of escalating warmongering, wear the same guilty look as a cat that has just pissed on the floor when its owner—the liberal mainstream—walks into the room, presenting the Ukrainian State and ruling class as an innocent victim in the condemnation-of-invasion mantra. 

Endless cheap condemnations of the invasion from SocDems, PBP, and Labour — yet still no condemnation of the recent 15-year sentence of the Zelensky regime handed to young Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who was jailed for his left political views \[30\]. Let us be clear: not only Ireland’s liberal ruling parties, but also the opportunistic left that expresses support for the Zelensky regime or does not condemn it, is complicit in such crimes. Of course, it is easy to condemn Russia together with its own ruling class and it is difficult to condemn Zelensky's proxy regime, which is a creature of its own ruling class and the condemnation of which may upset that ruling class. 

Condemning the invasion in 2026 has the same relevance to the current political moment as condemning the fall of Constantinople or the execution of Joan of Arc. We need to return from the sky to the earth and acknowledge that the 2022 Putin intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War is not the cause of the Ukrainian crisis, artificially created by the West, but the result of it—an outcome of this crisis that was both expected and desirable for the West. 

The war is a logical outcome of Western external rule and a great opportunity to get rid of it; to rethink and fix the self-destructive tendencies of Ukrainian Statehood over the last 12 years, while there are still some Ukrainians left alive. 

Would the West peacefully allow Ukraine to have any kind of self-rule and democracy ever again? Would it allow her to get rid of divisive chauvinist policies and make all her citizens equal once again? The answer is no. Why? Because the West is the aggressor and colonizer of Ukraine and the main cause of her civil war, ethnonationalist turn, and totalitarian State measures. The West owns Ukraine and, to maintain control, needs her to be weak, divided, dependent, delusional and terrorizing her own population. 

Any sovereigntist government of Ukraine, after restoring relations with Russia, ending cultural self destruction and abandoning the role of the West's barbarian army, would first abolish its enormous debt to the West, renationalize Ukrainian land sold to corporations, and get rid of the yoke of “agreements” such as the 2025 Zelensky–Trump mineral deal. How could the West allow this? 

It is common knowledge that the West can maintain relatively high standards of living, combined with the inequalities of Western societies, only because it exists at the expense of non-Western labor and non-Western resources. Otherwise, without extraction of labor, resources and now soldiers from colonies like Ukraine, who would fund and protect the pedophilia and private islands of the Western ruling class, and who would pay social welfare to the Western plebs, who have the lifelong option of smoking crack in the streets at “public” expense? 

Therefore, there is no doubt that the West will never leave Ukraine alone, and the liberation of Ukraine from the West can only be achieved by appealing to the previous successful experience of throwing out the previous expansionist United Europe. Being in a situation of choice between the very existence of Ukrainian people and the existence of Western rule over Ukraine, we need Western imperialism to be defeated in Ukraine and pro-Western regime to be changed.

![](https://aontachtmedia.ie/content/images/2026/09/berlin2.jpg)

The capital of previous United Europe after attempt of expansion of previous “universal values”. European expansion to the East has never been a good idea

Unlike the anti-people positions of both regional Western Ukrainian nationalism and the pan-Western nationalism of Azov, my position represents genuine anti-colonial Ukrainian nationalism, and I proudly declare myself radical Ukrainian nationalist. 

True Ukrainian nationalism must stand for national sovereignty, equality of all citizens, rejection of the ethnonational hierarchy, that damaging national unity, economic independence, neutrality, Euro Atlantic disengagement, decolonization from the West, and recognition of the Western expansionism as the existential threat, based on the experience of the past decade of Euro-American colonial devastation of Ukraine. 

**Bibliography** 

21\. “Moseychuk + David Arakhamiya.” YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lt4E0DiJts 

22\. “DECREE OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE No. 679/2022.” Official Internet Representation of the President of Ukraine. https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/6792022-44249 

23\. Martin, Micheál. “Taoiseach Micheál Martin in Kyiv to Meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” Government of Ireland. https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press releases/taoiseach-micheál-martin-in-kyiv-to-meet-ukrainian-president-volodymyr-zelenskyy/ 

24\. Ishchenko, Volodymyr. “‘Ukraine Is No Longer a Sovereign Country,’ Says Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko.” *BreakThrough News*, July 22, 

2026\. https://breakthroughnews.org/2026/07/22/ukraine-is-no-longer-a-sovereign-country-says sociologist-volodymyr-ishchenko/ 

25\. State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine. 'The SBI is investigating the circumstances of a man's death in Bukovina during an attempt to illegally cross the border.' https://dbr.gov.ua/news/dbr rozslidue-obstavini-smerti-cholovika-na-bukovini-pid-chas-sprobi-nelegalnogo-peretinu-kordonu 

26\. State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine. “The SBI is investigating the circumstances of a man's death during an attempt to illegally cross the border in the Odesa region.” 

https://dbr.gov.ua/news/dbr-rozslidue-obstavini-zagibeli-cholovika-pid-chas-sprobi nezakonnogo-peretinu-kordonu-na-odeshhini 

27\. "Since February 2022, 68.5 thousand border violators have been detained. The State Border Guard Service named the 'most popular' direction." Ukrainska Pravda. 

https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2026/05/19/8035367/ 

28\. Irish Independent. “Two Million Ukrainians Evading Military Call-Up, with 200,000 ‘AWOL,’ Defence Minister Reveals.” https://www.independent.ie/world-news/two-million-ukrainians evading-military-call-up-with-200000-awol-defence-minister-reveals/a/123864826.html 

29\. Immigration Service Delivery. “Information on Temporary Protection for People Fleeing the Conflict in Ukraine.” Government of Ireland. https://www.irishimmigration.ie/information-on temporary-protection-for-people-fleeing-the-conflict-in-ukraine/

30\. World Socialist Web Site. “International Support Surges for Jailed Ukrainian Socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/19/ublc-a19.html