Days after President Donald Trump predicted that Ukraine could win a war it has been losing for the past three years and regain “the original borders from where this war started,” Vice President J.D. Vance announced the possibility of sending Ukraine Tomahawk missiles that it could use to strike deep inside Russia. Even if the White House doesn’t send Tomahawks, the U.S. continues to fuel the proxy war with American weapons, albeit indirectly through a weapons pipeline the Trump administration established with NATO. 

The Trump administration’s change of course has been applauded by Western pundits, who lately have begun to sound less like strategists than like social-media influencers, posting lofty affirmations in the hope that if they repeat them enough, they can “manifest” a Ukrainian victory. But that long-impossible outcome cannot be conjured through rhetoric—it depends on manpower and other indigenous capabilities, none of which Ukraine possesses in greater measure than nuclear-armed Russia, a country with triple the population of Ukraine. 

To convince Americans that the failed Ukraine proxy war is still winnable, the establishment pundit class has launched a propaganda effort to depict Ukrainian capabilities and morale as stronger than they really are. Of course, these Western analysts say that the idea of Russian military superiority is propaganda. In the Financial Times, Yuval Harari writes that any assertion of inevitable Russian victory is a propaganda strategy aimed at “attacking the will of the Americans and Europeans.” The Ukrainians, Harari writes, will win because they have “the biggest and most experienced fighting force standing between the Russian army and Warsaw, Berlin or Paris.”

But far from having an elite, patriotic volunteer force, Kiev is sustaining its war effort through a coercive mobilization regime—what even the New York Times calls “people snatchers”—bands of government thugs who abduct unsuspecting young men off the street to be deployed against their will to the front lines. That the Ukrainians even want to fight is an idea that has been refuted by polling since November 2024, yet one that continues to be affirmed on cable news.

Though largely omitted from corporate media coverage of the war, Ukrainian Telegram channels are flooded with videos of draft officers wielding violence and other coercive methods to recruit conscripts for a war that has already killed an estimated 70,000–100,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In November 2023, former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovich claimed that at least 30 percent of Ukraine’s military units—and perhaps as much as 70 percent—were draft dodgers. Whatever the true number was then, it likely has only increased as the conflict has ground on and the need for manpower has grown more acute.

Desperation among conscription-age men has spawned an entire black market for survival. Schemes like “fake divorces” are engineered so fathers can claim sole custody of a child and thereby secure an exemption to leave the country. Others buy forged medical certificates or bribe doctors for disability papers. Even more rely on smugglers or border guards, who openly charge between $10,000 and $15,000 for safe passage. Thousands attempt to cross mountain rivers and backcountry trails to Romania, Hungary, or Poland; dozens have drowned in the Tisza or frozen in the Carpathians. 

Far from the picture of national unity painted by Western pundits, NATO war demands have fueled a two-tiered draft system: Working-class men are chased off the streets and funneled to the front lines, while the children and relatives of Ukraine’s political elites evade service through loopholes, bribes, or foreign university enrollment that place their families safely abroad. 

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Ihor Shvaika, deputy head of the 4th Territorial Defense recruitment center, labeled children who went abroad to study as “rats fleeing a sinking ship,” calling for military training to begin at age 5 for all Ukrainians. Meanwhile, his own children are in Belgium. Taras Batenko, a parliamentarian who has attacked the Ministry of Education for ignoring the exodus of students, quietly enrolled his daughter in a prestigious Dutch university with tuition approaching $17,000 a year, no small sum for the average Ukrainian.

American war planners have long understood Ukraine’s conscription crisis and the corruption it has enabled. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan conceded last November what many Western pundits will not: Ukraine’s most important needs relate to “mobilization and manpower,” not Western weaponry. When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte boasted last week that America had “opened the floodgates” for a constant flow of weapons, he neglected to mention who would be holding them: a generation of Ukrainian men who would rather flee their country than fight over who rules its eastern provinces.

Pundits can applaud the administration’s new hopes for Ukraine and Vance’s talk of Tomahawk missiles. They can repeat their affirmations of “victory” and celebrate the heroism of Ukraine’s military. But that military relies on troops forced into service and a society desperate to avoid the front. And that’s no way for a nation to win a war, no matter how many Tomahawks America may send them.