The heated exchange that broke out between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office last Friday has captured the world’s attention. One reason is simply that it’s rare to see genuine face-to-face arguments between world leaders happen out in front of the cameras. But, adding to that, it was striking to watch Vance and Trump issue a sharp rebuke to a leader that virtually all government officials in the West have treated like an unassailable saint.
In the past few days, there has been a lot of analysis about the appropriateness of the exchange and the potential geopolitical implications of a breakdown in trust between US and Ukrainian officials. But one notable comment has gone almost entirely unmentioned in the subsequent freakout.
After Zelensky kicked things off by using a rhetorical question to challenge Vance on his appeal to the need for diplomacy, Vance fired back by calling Zelensky out for “forcing conscripts to the front lines because [he] has manpower problems.”
As far as I can tell, that was the first time a senior American government official has made any negative comment about the Ukrainian government’s use of conscripts in its war with Russia. Which is appalling, because abducting people and sending them to fight and die in a military campaign they clearly don’t believe in enough to join voluntarily is one of the worst, most tyrannical things a government can do. And Ukraine has been doing it with the enthusiastic support of American officials for years.
The conscription system in both Ukraine and Russia goes back to the days of the Soviet Union, where all male citizens were required to serve two years in the military. After the USSR dissolved, both countries kept the requirement in place, but over time, the term was gradually reduced to one year.
In 2013, then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych abolished conscription. But a year later, the new Western-backed government that had overthrown Yanukovych with US support reinstated the draft in order to force men to fight the eastern Ukrainians who did not want to live under the new regime in Kyiv.
Under this conscription system, men who had finished their active duty term were placed on reserve status, where they were eligible to be drafted back into the military until the age of 55.
The fighting, obviously, did not stay contained to eastern Ukraine. In 2022, when Russian forces invaded, Zelensky declared martial law, called up men in the reserves, conscripted new soldiers, and prohibited men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.
In the years since the Ukrainian government has gone to more and more draconian lengths to apprehend and force unwilling men into the fight. Early on, Ukrainians who did not want to die to protect the regime in Kyiv’s claim over the territory of eastern Ukraine were able to avoid the draft by staying away from their official address, where draft officers were required to confront them. But the government loosened the rules and allowed patrols to track down new conscripts wherever they might be.
Ukraine then took after the Russians and transitioned to an online portal system, which made it even easier to find and register all eligible men for the draft. And later on, as the Ukrainian military’s manpower problems got worse, the minimum draft eligibility age was lowered from 27 to 25.
All this has led to a terrifying status quo where police and military units are patrolling the streets, stores, metro stations, and restaurants of Ukrainian cities, checking the papers of every man aged 25 to 60 and hauling away those unlucky enough to be drafted into a deadly artillery war that Ukraine has no serious chance of winning—all, we’re told, to protect Ukrainians from tyranny.
Since February 2022, over one million Ukrainian men have been taken away from their professional and family lives and forced to join the war. Many have died.
The only problem the Biden administration ever had about any of this was that the minimum draft age was too high. Biden’s team spent the last year of their term pressuring the Ukrainians to start drafting boys as young as 18 and sending them into the meat grinder to keep the war going a bit longer.
Of course, the Russian government has been conscripting soldiers and sending them to their deaths, too. And that’s just as evil. But at least we Americans haven’t been forced to bankroll it.
Conscription is one of the worst ways that governments violate the rights of people living under them. Not only is it quite literally a form of slavery, it’s the worst kind of slavery, where the enslaved are forced to kill and/or die for someone else’s cause. A cause that, despite all the government’s propaganda, the people fighting do not believe in enough to take up the fight voluntarily. It should disgust every American that, rather than condemning this heinous program, our government spent years pushing for its expansion.
And it should concern us too. As William Norman Grigg put it, “...conscription indisputably rests on the assumption that each individual is the State’s property, to be sacrificed when those controlling the State deem it necessary for their protection.” The American political establishment has made it very clear that they wholeheartedly believe that assumption.
As minimal as it was, Vance’s comment was a welcome departure from that consensus.
