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Comment by warmonger | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, pretty sad situation especially if you have some empathy for those who don't want to fight but got tricked by their governments. Imagine you're 18 again and you have your plans to study in University, but instead the government which should serve the people (ha) sends you to die for a piece of land and to keep their leader positions.

In the end those wars are just a power and influence games for the ruling class.

Sometimes I think if the world would be better if instead of ~200 counties we had only ~10? But how to unite counties? People can agree to unite, but no one from the ruling class will agree to lose the power. So we are back to the war theme, because the war is the easiest way to unite pieces of land, but how to unite people? No idea, but... but we can find a new common enemy!

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Ukraine draft age limit is now 25. It was lowered from 27 in 2024. If you are young and heading to university, you’re safe (for now). Even if the age limit is lowered, it will likely apply to NEETs first.

Good to know, but my comment is not about Ukraine or any other country in particular

> Imagine you're 18 again and you have your plans to study in University, but instead the government which should serve the people (ha) sends you to die for a piece of land and to keep their leader positions

Your simplistic narrative doesn't capture the reality of the situation, at all. The people of Ukraine weren't given a choice of whether to be at war or not, doubly so for people in the eastern part of the country. And it's not just about who is the "leader", but rather staring down a known pattern of atrocities and long-term economic oppression. So attributing the responsibility of who ruined those plans to "the government" is just fallacious.

Your pragmatic personal decision might still be to run, and I wouldn't be arguing against that. But extrapolating that personal decision out to a general condemnation of other reactions to being attacked is disingenuous and reeks of the demoralizing propaganda put out by Russia.

Thanks for your analysis, but I never said anything about Ukraine in my post

Ukraine is the topic of the thread, so you were implicitly talking about it.

For what it's worth, I would have agreed where you're coming from 10-15 years ago. But from a Western perspective it's very easy to forget that there is such a thing as a defensive war

For example, I'm having trouble coming up with the last defensive war the US mainland actually experienced where a loss would have resulted in a different government. It feels like it was so long ago that it makes the question moot.

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