April Huggett traded her life as a homemaker in Canada for the trenches of Ukraine to defend democracy and freedom against Russia’s expansionist ambitions

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24587194

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April Huggett traded her life as a homemaker in Canada for the trenches of Ukraine to defend democracy and freedom against Russia’s expansionist ambitions

Until 2022, April Huggett’s life revolved around caring for her three children, then aged two, seven, and 11. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shook her so much that she decided to trade that life as a homemaker for the trenches and daily bombings on the Donetsk front, one of the most active of the war, to defend democracy and the free world where she was born against the expansionist threat of Russia. “After the Bucha massacre, it was really hard for me to move on. It was so similar to World War II… I looked at my children and thought I had to do something,” she recalls at the foot of a trench in a Donbas forest, where she is training with her comrades from the Alcatraz Battalion. Huggett, 36, wasn’t content with being a volunteer; she enlisted and, since December 2024, has served as a combat medic for this battalion, part of the 93rd Kholodny Yar Separate Mechanized Brigade and made up exclusively of ex-convicts who took up a government offer of sentence reductions to fight on the front lines. Huggett disinfects the finger of a recruit who has just cut himself on a tool and says: “These people are my family. They are my friends.”

  • sudneo@lemm.ee
    7·
    3 days ago

    TIL resistance fighters are equivalent of dictatorial murder squads.

    Like really, wtf? Violence and murders are not all the same.

    • pedz@lemmy.ca
      22·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, the brave Canadian resistance fighters that defended Canada in Afghanistan. Or the brave heroic American resistance fighters that defended the US from the invading Iraqis, by killing and torturing thousands of civilians. So noble. Thanks for their service.

      • sudneo@lemm.ee
        1·
        3 days ago

        If the US ever invades my country and I somehow need to kill Americans, I won’t be a fucking hero, I’ll be a murderer, just like them. It’s nothing to be praised. Even if I just help others “defending” my country using my tech skills, it’ll still be helping to murder others. I really really can’t understand doing that willingly

        This was your example. It’s a completely different argument, in which you compared invading and mounting a resistance to an invasion. I get your argument, but it’s absolutely arbitrary that those willing to defend are the same willing to.invade, historically that is completely false in fact.