I would also want to be carrying a rifle. And not just for the obvious reason of wanting to defend my country.
It was decades ago as a teenager who was just starting to figure out sex that I read about what Russian soldiers did to the German women (and others) as they marched their way west during their offensive war against the Nazis. For the record, I do not mean to diminish the scope of the crimes committed by the Nazis during their military campaign against Russia. It is indeed possible that the Russian soldiers were motivated in part by the horrific treatment of the women of their own country by German soldiers. There is a longstanding, ugly tradition of men debasing women associated with their (male) enemies as a means of "polluting" their enemies' bloodlines and damaging their presumed "property".
In my twenties, I spoke with a German fellow who had been an adolescent during WWII. He told me about a teenaged girl who lived in the apartment above his family's. "They [the Russians] were up there every night."
In this country, we may have forgotten the lessons of history and glossed over the Second World War as script material for John Wayne movies. I suspect the women of Eastern Europe have not.
So, if I were a Ukrainian woman, I would want to take out as many Russian soldiers as possible and die from gunfire while defending my country and myself.
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