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Ukraine is already taking away its male citizens right to life. Taking away its female citizens right to date German men is a small step in comparison.
If the government is going to conscript men and send them to the front to die, then all citizens should chip in and help. Women should be working in arms plants, farms, and in support roles in the military. And, yes, they should be there to form families with the returning soldiers when the war is over.
And if these women would prefer not to, shouldn't Ukrainian men get to opt out as well?
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
Agency doesn't mean free choice. When they tried mere negotiations, Boris Johnson flew over to scream at them until they stopped.
Okay, so how, exactly, did Boris Johnson stop them? What's the specific mechanism? Screaming? THat's not really enough to force anyone to do anything in geopolitics.
How am I supposed to know? It's not like I was in those behind-closed-doors meetings, but that those meetings took place in response to the Russian peace offer is not in question, as far as I understand. I would imagine he did it the way countries usually do - the threat of withholding some carrot, or applying some stick, or both.
What carrot would he have had? Weapons shipment? Little need for those if Ukrainians were hell-bent for peace. NATO membership? Explicit Russian demand was for Ukraine to not be in NATO, at this point. EU membership? There was a certain event some years ago that means Boris Johnson did not exactly have leverage on this point.
I'm not sure what other stick there would have been apart from UK actually invading Ukraine itself, which, uh, would have certainly caused a lot of questions, home and abroad.
Why do you assume they threatened Ukraine, as opposed to Zelenksy directly? The position Boris allegedly expressed was clear. The West was not ready for the war to be over. You think if Zelensky declined their generous offer for "help", they wouldn't have found someone who would accept it? Or would have even threatened to?
If the theory is that someone would have taken over and continued fighting anyway, sure, but you don't even need the West in that participation at all. There were plenty of figures in Ukraine who had already been convinced for years that Zelensky was a Russophile traitor. One does not take the job he did if they are that concerned over their own physical survival.
The point is that a lot rests on the assumption that the Ukrainians would have been ready to make peace - would have probably made peace - at this point, but the West somehow stopped them from doing this. This assumption is not built on particularly solid ground.
And yet those talks, allegedly, were the closest Ukraine and Russia had gotten to a negotiated peace. "The Ukrainians" would have no more to do with ratifying the peace than the average American has in constantly sending them weapons.
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