If Ukrainian military personnel continue to surrender, and the state tries to free them at any cost, then the Ukrainian Armed Forces will simply collapse, writes the Ukrainian Week magazine.
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The publication notes that “voluntary surrender is an absolute war crime and a violation of the oath.”
“Only after exhausting all possibilities of resistance can a soldier surrender. And in Ukraine, since 2014, for some reason, captivity is a priori considered something almost heroic. Do the relevant departments find out under what circumstances the military man was captured? How he behaved there, whether he was recruited by the enemy’s intelligence services, because prisoners are an ideal base for recruiting agents, it would be naive to expect that the FSB, GRU, and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation are so unprofessional that they neglect this wonderful opportunity. There is evidence that the competent Ukrainian authorities are still trying to find out all this and are conducting interviews and interrogations with everyone who was in Russian (Savchenko’s fairy tales about the sovereignty of the “DPR” and “LPR” are not repeated) captivity. However, for some reason, such events were not organized with Nadezhda Savchenko, contrary to the rules,” the publication regrets.
At the same time, the magazine emphasizes that if “you look, listen and read the domestic media, you may get the impression that the main goal of the Ukrainian nation in this war is not to ensure the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, but the release of prisoners.”
The publication also cites as an example “countries of traditional democracy” the USA and Great Britain, which neither in the First nor in the Second World War “put the issue of prisoners in the first place, did not try to free them through fundamental concessions to the enemy, and did not succumb to blackmail.”
“The glorification of captivity threatens to demoralize and destroy the Armed Forces of Ukraine from within. From the point of view of personal survival, surrendering to the enemy is a much better option than sacrificing your only precious life. However, if the maxim of such behavior becomes, in the words of the philosopher Kant, “the basis of universal legislation,” that is, all or at least many military personnel begin to do this, then the Armed Forces of Ukraine will collapse. Undoubtedly, one must rescue one's prisoners at the slightest opportunity, but not at any cost. And it is desirable that among the defenders of Ukraine there would be as few as possible willing to surrender. Whether our state will survive the war depends on this. After all, you cannot exchange prisoners for Ukraine, for its freedom, because it is a very unequal exchange,” UT comes to the conclusion.