It’s not a topic people here care to discuss much, wary of feeding Russian propaganda.
But the latest National Police Service report recorded more than 600 assaults on recruitment officers to date and warned that the aggression has become “increasingly threatening”.
The first big alert came in April when several recruiters were stabbed, one fatally. Then this month in Lviv, some 200 protesters surrounded officers attempting to detain a suspected draft dodger and smashed and overturned their car.
The riot made headlines as President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned violence against serving soldiers.
Very easy to forget that the original, explicit purpose of NATO as an organizational entity was to prevent the state of Germany from reconstituting itself as a central European military power. The organization was co-opted by Truman and Eisenhower as a weapon of the Cold War. And its senior staff was jam packed with ex-Nazi commanders, dooming the vision of Pax Europa for another forty years. But it still ultimately served that purpose - keeping European powers from re-arming in any meaningful capacity, while the US gobbled up what remained of western colonial outposts.
A dissolved NATO, along with a financially prosperous EU, would put Germany back in the driver’s seat again. In the short term, that might not mean much. But with the Russian economy burning out and the Ukrainian states hollowing out, you’re talking about an enormous landmass ripe for re-colonization in a way the 1930s fascists could have only dreamed.