Russia and Ukraine

[The Grand Nudger]

Volunteer units in an all volunteer force go the other way with it. Rightly or wrongly. You are special. You're certainly worth more than dozens of hesitant conscripts who would rather be anywhere else. You're not a burger flipper forced onto a bus, you're a professional soldier. That's what you do. Ukraine had to overcome their own conscript mindset at the outset of the war. Jut like russia, ukraines military was a hallowed out shell. Service wasn't honorable - it wasn't sexy. It was for suckers and dum dums and grifters. If ukraine had to go to war with their pre-2014 army this probably would be all over already. One of the main avenues of domestic criticism of zelensky before the invasion was that he wasn't hooah enough, wasn't tough enough, wasn't service minded enough. That he would seek to accommodate. Mostly because he tried to do exactly that.

Yet another thing master strategist putin couldn't see coming. I guess the idea that ukranians would rise up against an invader is something so far outside of his own expectations for his own people that the thought never crossed his mind. Sure as shit, nobody lifted a finger to stop prigos march on moscow.