The Jewish President of the Ukrainian revolutionary government, Volodymyr Zelensky, has declared that all men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to leave the country because they have to stay and fight. This effectively means that they are now drafted members of a citizen’s militia, and can therefore no longer be considered “civilians” and are in fact “enemy combatants.”
I just read through several parts of the Geneva and Hague Conventions relating to this issue of the way citizens are differentiated from combatants. Here’s a summary on the Red Cross website. It’s not entirely clear if they have to have “taken up arms,” or what that means. There is no way to know if a citizen’s militia is armed or not – especially when they are passing out Molotov cocktails – or as they call them now, Bandera smoothies (named after Stepan Bandera, the first leader who promoted the idea of Ukraine as a “nation”).
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