Why Are The Ukrainians Still Fighting?

One of the regular points of discussion in the samizdat-right of Russia is the question of whether or not conscripted Ukrainians want to be fighting this war. We have several data points to work with when trying to figure out the mentality of the average conscript.

First, we have videos constantly surfacing of Ukrainians servicemen complaining about the conditions that they find themselves in and leaving their positions after themselves being abandoned by their commanders. The secret police is then sent in to arrest the units who refused to be tossed in the meat grinder.

This, however, is proof of low morale, not proof that these conscripts are against the war. If they did consider Russia to be a friend and an ally, they would, presumably, surrender to the Russians. Russian propaganda goes to great lengths to emphasize that they treat prisoners well and there’s no reason to believe that they would go out of their way to mistreat prisoners.

Ukrainians living in Russia, however, well, that’s another matter.

The FSB is swooping down on regular Ukrainians living in Russia all the time now. Quotas have been set and the secret police needs to justify its budget I suppose. From my own anecdotal data sources, I know of three Ukrainian families who have been swooped on, detained and either deported or sent to a penal colony on trumped up charges. I’ll give you one example: a very intelligent and capable Ukrainian man who holds a synthetic fertilizer chemical formula patent to his name and who, upon being raided by the FSB, was found to be in possession of some medieval-style knives. The man was a HEMA-enthusiast (Historical European Martial Arts) and this was, apparently, grounds enough to arrest him. He was sentenced within the week and sent to a penal colony for four years. I don’t think he’ll serve the full four years, but still. Ridiculous.

The behavior of the FSB and the secret police everywhere you find them is nothing short of criminal. I’m going to be writing more about this phenomenon in the days to come.

Anyways.

People point out that the soldiers are being paid wartime wages and that money might be enough to convince them to go off and risk injury and death. I’m not so sure about this explanation. Now that Europe is open, Ukrainians can go over and drive trucks, pick strawberries, fix toilets and that sort of thing. If anything, money is actually a far better explanation for why Russian professional troops are motivated to fight. These troops get paid well and private outfits like Wagner do even better. I remember talking to a Wagner guy in 2017 and was told that 200,000 roubles a month patrolling some warlord’s diamond mine or something in Africa was pretty standard. That’s solid money. A year of that kind of work translates to a new studio apartment in the exurbs of St. P or Moscow. Two years of that work and you’re getting a 3-bedroom in the commieblocks on the edge of town. Six years and you might be able to get a Stalinka on the edge of the inner ring. A decade of that kind of work and your kids are rubbing shoulders with the mazhor brats of the Moscow nomenklatura. Not so for Ukraine.

But I’m not going to go down and list all of the possible explanations.

I think the answer is quite simple: the Ukrainians are fighting because they were told to fight. That’s it. That’s how authority works; people naturally follow orders from on high. It’s probably genetic even because following the chieftain used to be a viable strategy for survival. For most of history, there wasn’t such a huge disconnect between the ruler and the ruled. Both groups needed each other to a large extent and the captain went down with the ship if things got too bad. The interests of the ruler and ruled aligned more often than they didn’t.

Now though, a hostile shtetl rules both Ukraine and the West. Their authority is illegitimate, but, they remain the authority regardless. And so, when orders come down from on high, most people obey them. Not all people, mind you. Our little Substack community is filled with people who are suspicious of the ruling elite, for example. Some people, it seems, have a heretic gene within them that predisposes them to distrusting authority. This is probably a part of our natural design as well. Genes play out on both an individual and group level. You need the vast majority of people to be conformists, but you also need a certain percentage to challenge the status quo. Certain groups of people seem to have a slightly higher predisposition to heresy than others, but the general distribution is more-or-less the same. The majority will, despite their various viewpoints and supposedly deeply-held ideological convictions, follow orders from on high.

Point being, if Russia had control of these territories, they could just as easily have called up the people to fight NATO instead of having NATO call them up to fight Russia.

That is why the fight for these positions of authority is so important. If the power of authority wasn’t so overwhelming, these positions wouldn’t be so coveted. Heretics could just go to the people directly, convince them using the logic of their arguments, and the deed would already be done - the people would be convinced to no longer obey the authorities. But this is not what happens. This is not the observable reality that we are dealing with. Hippy-style appeals to the power of the people to organize themselves without hierarchies or appeals to authority fall flat on their face because only a certain percentage of people are capable of thinking this way. Most people are always following the leader. The only real question is: who is the leader? It doesn’t have to be the president of a country or a general, mind you. It could be a cult leader or a celebrity artist or even a boss at the company.

Ukrainian soldiers go to get shot up and bombed to pieces because their commander told them to do so.

They showed up for the draft because the police told them to do so.

They fight against Russia because their president told them to do so.

They hate Russia because their teachers in school told them to do so.

There really isn’t much more to the riddle than that.

This should be a sobering realization for Westerners. Your countrymen, if told to do so, will be carted off to war with Russia as well. They may grumble about it and they may shirk their duties as best they can, sure. But they’ll go along with it just like they went along with the Great Reset, the Great Replacement and all the other insane agendas that have been forced by them by people in positions of authority.

One of the key points that dissidents ought to take away from this lesson is the need to create alternative sources of authority. If you can’t take the presidency or the generalcy or the the CEOship of some big company, you can simply create an alternative position of authority. Popular YouTubers like PewDiePie exert far more influence and authority on Zoomers than Joe Biden does, for example. That is why it is so important to declare oneself to be the alternative authority to the political powers that be at the very least. This is why governments-in-exile or schismatic religious movements are so important. The successful ones declare the authority of their opponents to be illegitimate and demand that their authority be recognized over theirs. This causes a glitch in the authority-following behavior pattern of people. They know that they have to follow the authority figure, but now they don’t know which to follow.

This approach works with the grain of human nature and not against it.

Russia should have set up an alternative government in Ukraine and started issuing orders from it. Instead of basically conceding that Kiev was the legitimate authority of Ukraine, they should have gotten together some pro-Russian Ukrainians, declared them the legitimate government of Ukraine and started issuing contradictory orders through them. They still haven’t done this. Where is the Ukrainian government-in-exile? Why haven’t they found a pro-Russian with a Ukrainian passport and declared him the legitimate authority over Ukraine?

Now, there are self-styled Ukrainian loyalist groups on Telegram, true, but they have no recognition or support from the Kremlin or state-media whatsoever. They’re also a bunch of clowns.

Regardless, Russia simply does not use “active measures” - a point that seems to be becoming readily more apparent as the months go by. The MFA is also Liberal and thinks in terms of “international law and order rules human rights democracy”. Stop pretending that they’re based. Talk to some of the students from Moscow State University - you know, the Georgetown equivalent that has a giant tower - in Russia.

Talk to them and tell me that these are /ourguys/. They’re not. They are completely enslaved by the foreign Liberal Western ideology that their professors drill into their heads.

Most Ukrainians, at this point, don’t seem to want to be fighting. The authorities in Ukraine have to shanghai men into the military by patrolling beach resorts, workout playgrounds, border crossings and so on. But there isn’t an alternative authority telling Ukrainians to, I don’t know, overthrow the government in their local towns, for example. There are millions of Ukrainians living in Russia right now. There is no official, government-organized pro-Russian Ukrainian volunteer army dedicated to overthrowing the occupation government in Kiev.

The Ukrainians, on the other hand, do have a pro-Ukraine Russian volunteer force.

It’s not very effective, and it’s not going to swing the war in their favor, but it shows that some clever Western advisors are hard at work in Kiev, trying to turn the ship around at the very least. This is a very standard tactic employed since the days of Napoleon at the very least, who filled his Grande Armée with volunteer dissident divisions fighting for independence from one empire or another, like the Poles against the Russian Empire, famously.

If Russia isn’t even willing to do that for the territories of Ukraine past the contact line, what are the odds that they’ll support your nascent band of rebels fighting for freedom against the Globohomo Empire? I have never even heard the concept discussed anywhere. Not on TV, not in any journals and certainly not from anyone in the MFA. These people simply do not think in these terms. I think they really do mean it when they whine that they just want to do business and be left alone. Furthermore, there is no Brzeziński equivalent in Russia talking about decades-long plans to break up the EU and kick the Americans out of Europe by funding nativist or fundamentalist or even immigrant political movements. No, Dugin isn’t the same, not by a long stretch.

This kind of work has to be done on the grassroots level and then forced into the public discourse. Russians ought to start asking questions like: “Why are we not playing for keeps? Why do our enemies seem so much more serious about winning than we are?” And so on. Ukraine ought to be treated as a lesson in power, corruption, geopolitics and propaganda.

Westerners ought to be asking politicians who pretend to be rebels against the system when campaigning for their votes and money the same questions, by the way. We all need to start getting more serious about this stuff, folks. We gotta start figuring things out. We gotta start coming up with some strategies beyond, “let’s wait and see”.