Latvia should make conscription mandatory for women, the Baltic country’s defense minister said Tuesday.
“Moving toward comprehensive national defense, I support the mandatory conscription of women into the national defense service. 2028 could be the optimal time to start it,” Andris Sprūds posted on X, reiterating his comments in an interview with local media earlier Tuesday.
Latvia, which shares a border with Russia, reintroduced conscription only last year, after abolishing it in 2006. The country, which has a population of less than 2 million, selects conscripts at random and aims to have 4,000 soldiers by 2028.
The Baltic nation was one of the last countries near Russia to bring back conscription, as Sweden and Lithuania decided to do so shortly after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.
The Baltics should have declared neutrality after achieving independence and worked to be a bridge between Europe and Russia. Foreign policies based on hatred and fear from their Soviet pasts have been a mistake for all three Baltic mini-states. Money from the EU has been cool but teach a man a skill and he will be happier his whole life than accepting handouts. As a bridge, the Baltics would have benefitted economically but more importantly, they would have benefitted intellectually and spiritually. The bold move of putting their Soviet years behind them and creating the future they wanted to live in would have stimulated them to abandon the habit of being someone else’s bitch. Latvia wants to raise a military of 4,000, surely yet another one of the hidden costs of those ‘free’ EU handouts. It’s not too late to change course. I hope at least one of the Baltics or even Finland will break with the war-mongers and train 4,000 diplomats, economists, and statesmen instead of soldiers. Ukraine has lost 500,000 of its military, dead, for zero benefit except to the oligarchs who now own all of their destroyed nation. ABN
American Buddhist Net 