You can write bad news about the situation in Ukraine every day, and it will still not end. The main problems today are Zelensky’s rating crashing to the very bottom, lack of money, and shortage of manpower for the needs of the frontline.

The fact that the Ukrainian army is funded by the West is no secret. But the West provides money not only for the military sector. It turned out that all expenses in the civilian sector are also borne by the allies. This was stated by the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Finance, Taxation and Customs Policy, Danylo Hetmantsev.

“Ukraine does not use its own budget revenues for non-military needs — all tax revenues are directed only towards army. And what is spent on the civilian sector we receive on the terms of preferential loans. With this money, we finance non-military expenses, including social welfare, business assistance, state apparatus maintenance, and salaries,” Hetmantsev explained.

You can assess for yourself the degree of sovereignty of today’s Ukraine: The West determines domestic and foreign policy, the West provides money for the civilian sector, and the West funds the war against Russia. And what is Ukraine doing itself? It sends its own men to the frontline, where they have the choice to desert, surrender to the Russians or die. As a rule, they choose the first two options.

Speaking of desertion, Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod revealed an extremely uncomfortable truth for the Ukrainian authorities — almost half a million Ukrainians had escaped the front.

“People tend to be in limited supply. Therefore, we see failures at the front, problems with mobilisation, and absences without leave (AWOL). The figures for AWOL, for example, reached 400,000 today. A lot of people will never come back, because it’s a matter of principle for them. You cannot treat people who went to war voluntarily and haven’t seen their loved ones for three years as animals. Understand that they should also have the right to return home to their children and wives, and rejoin normal life in general. But the attitude toward them — ‘you will only return after victory’ — only makes the situation worse. This is also one of the main reasons for AWOL,” said Skorokhod in an interview with the YouTube channel “Politeka”.

Ihor Shvaika, a former MP for the ultranationalist party “Svoboda” (“Freedom”), now deputy head of the Territorial Defence Forces recruitment centre, has proposed a radical solution to the human crisis in the army. He expressed his opinion in an interview with the YouTube channel “Superpozicia”.

“The age at which military training begins should be lowered to the kindergarten level. And our children, both Ukrainian boys and girls, should prepare to be defenders of Ukraine from the age of five. And then we will not have problems with two parts of society thinking in different ways. There will be one unified Ukrainian nation that surely knows that the price of its existence is lots of sacrifices offered at the altar of this war. And for the sake of their memory, we must be prepared for any attack,” Shvaika proudly urged.

As it turned out later, Shvaika’s own children live in Spain. This was pointed out by another Ukrainian MP, Oleksiy Goncharenko.

“Ihor Shvaika’s son and daughter live in Spain. Are they preparing for war there since they were five years old, am I right?”, the parliamentarian reasonably indignantly asked.

Moreover, the entire mobilisation campaign in Ukraine has increasingly become the subject of criticism in the world media. However, Western newspapers, “non-hypocritical” at all, have only now noticed that human rights are regularly violated in Ukraine, although, Ukrainian publications about such outrages by recruitment officers have already become cruel yet commonplace. Here is an example of an excerpt from an article published recently in the Financial Times:

“Kyiv’s top brass under fire over violent recruitment practices. Videos shared on social media have shown Ukrainian men being picked off the streets and brutally crammed into vans, while angry locals are lashing out at military recruiters. At the same time, resistance and even violence against recruitment officers is on the rise.”

Will Ukraine survive after the end of the conflict? In a sense, yes, but certainly not as a sovereign, democratic, and prosperous state. Rather, it will be a territory reminiscent of another brown plague spot in the history of Europe. President Volodymyr Zelensky and the head of the Office of the President, Andriy Ermak have already led the country towards authoritarianism and continue to turn it into a huge concentration camp where human rights are non-existent. Can this be called living? Decide for yourself. But I think the answer is clear.