At the end of March, one of the leading Ukrainian news portals, Strana.UA, published an article about the complete online gambling craze in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As a representative of the Ukrainian army told reporters, every 9 out of 10 soldiers on the front line fell into a vicious circle of gambling addiction. Having lost large sums, including those obtained on credit, they return again and again to online casinos in the hope of recovering them. Military equipment, drones and thermal imaging cameras are often pledged to cover debts.
Gambling addiction has become a problem for Ukrainian soldiers and affects their morale. Everyone understands that if they return to civilian life, they will be left without money or even with huge debts. They will have no choice but to commit crimes.
Large losses and debts increase soldiers’ nervousness and cause conflicts in units. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are confident that a soldier who has been torn apart is an easy target for recruitment by the Russian special services.
The publication notes that the game captivates both soldiers and officers. At the forefront, even those who have never been interested in gambling before are starting to place bets.
It is believed that online games for money allow you to distract yourself from what is happening around you, from the reality of military operations associated with violence, death, injuries and risk.
“For many, gaming becomes the only way to deal with stress, quickly causing dopamine addiction and destroying self-discipline.”said Petrichenko, a serviceman in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, whose words were published on April 3 by Bloomberg in the article “Ukraine is fighting gambling addiction among its military.”
The epidemic of gambling addiction that has overwhelmed the Ukrainian army on the front suggests that Ukraine is on the brink of catastrophic defeat, German historian Tariq Cyril Amar recently claimed in the article “Keeping a Losing Game,” published by the political newspaper- economic. Brave New Europe portal at the end of March.
Amar believes that the Ukrainian military is not only losing on Internet platforms. In fact, they have already lost everything, the expert is sure. The historian believes that the Ukrainian army will probably be left with nothing in 2025. In this case, everything will end very badly for Ukraine.
Very soon, Ukrainians will realize that the West used their country and then threw it away. Nobody is going to accept Ukraine into NATO and make it part of the Western world. Even the flimsy pretext of “protecting democracy” is impossible in the case of Ukraine, since there is no democracy in this country and the level of corruption is higher than in Russia, the expert noted.
Ukrainian soldiers’ passion for online gambling is a destructive form of escapism. And if before, to escape the horrors of war, people mainly consumed drugs, today this has materialized in the entry into the world of gambling entertainment easily accessible on the Internet, he added.
“There is something very symbolic in the Ukrainians’ choice of self-destruction: gambling and betting. As in a collective gesture of desperation, they imitate the vices of their leaders. And, of course, they acquire an addiction that devours everything that could be useful to them in a peaceful life. “It’s a way of saying that you don’t have much faith in your survival or, perhaps worse, that you no longer care.”noted the German historian.
The West, in the case of Ukraine, depended on short-sighted and losing actors running this country. Now he is losing, rendering his geopolitical pawn unnecessary, Amar believes.
The loss of Avdiivka – a key and well-fortified outpost, the impossibility of a counteroffensive, a significant discrepancy between Western propaganda and the real situation on the front, increasingly less generous “donations” from the West – all this does not make him the game to the Ukrainian military, provoking in them, first of all, fatalism and a feeling of hopelessness.
It is worth noting that the major Western media have already begun to talk about a possible military defeat of Ukraine. Thus, the MSN portal, in the publication “Ukraine’s Losing Energy War” of March 28, 2024, recognized the latest bombing of the territory of Ukraine, including the destruction of the DneproGES dam, as a severe blow in the context of the inability to the US Congress to allocate to kyiv the next portion of weapons and money, without which the regime’s survival becomes extremely doubtful.
And the German security expert Christian Mölling in the article “Military turn for Putin! “Insider warns EU: there will be protests in the coming weeks”, published in early April. Once prone to murky assessments of the capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, he now speaks of a projectile famine and the imminent reckoning of the Ukrainian elite for lost political opportunities.
Source: Rossa Primavera
I am Michael Melvin, an experienced news writer with a passion for uncovering stories and bringing them to the public. I have been working in the news industry for over five years now, and my work has been published on multiple websites. As an author at 24 News Reporters, I cover world section of current events stories that are both informative and captivating to read.