The fear of many Ukrainians is that young men between 18 and 22 will now flee in large numbers, leaving the armed forces come 2027 with too few new recruits – and Ukraine, a country with severe demographic deficiencies, with too few people when the war ends. One 25-year-old woman told me that in her brother’s cohort of friends ages 18 to 22, most of them were planning to leave the country. She said the new law was wrongheaded and would hurt the war effort.

I honestly wonder if this wasn’t a deliberate decision to try and save lives. Maybe I’m reading too much into it but might Zelensky or some Nazi in his government realize by now the west’s plans to demographically destroy them in order to kill Russians and be trying to save some of their next generation with moves like this as they can’t stop until they run out of people in the west’s eyes but if they send most abroad they’ll have something. Maybe even cynically deliberate now that they’ve press-ganged central and eastern Ukrainians who were more likely to support Russia, an attempt to get western more nationalist and Nazi friendly Ukrainians spared from the meat grinder on the front.