‘I dream it will stop’: a stalled war tests Ukrainian morale
Listening to the daily drone of artillery hitting nearby towns, a school principal in southern Ukraine appealed to parents for donations for a new bomb shelter.
A soldier and his girlfriend gave up hope that the war against Russia would end soon and decided to get engaged, despite having no idea when he would come home.
One woman, who had been depressed about the instability for months, decided to stop worrying and imagine that peace might come next spring, along with the blossoms.
“I felt so helpless,” said the woman, Tetyana Kuksa, who works at a market in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. “I dream it will stop.”
With the Ukrainian army trapped in trenches along the front line and feeling that weapons from allies arrived too late and will now begin to dwindle, Ukrainians are increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for a quick victory, polls and interviews show. Hope, a linchpin in Ukraine’s fight against a much more powerful enemy, has suffered a blow.
The result is a nation that prepares with a kind of sober resignation for a life with war as a constant and no end in sight.
It’s a trend, not waving the white flag. The vast majority of Ukrainians remain rebellious, support President Volodymyr Zelensky and trust their military. The spirit that led Ukrainian bartenders, truck drivers and university professors to enlist in the military after Russia invaded in February 2022 is still on display every day.
But recent polls show it has faded by several measures.
Willingness for a negotiated settlement with Russia has increased in a small but still significant way for the first time since the invasion began, according to polls and focus group studies, rising from 10 to 14 percent, although the vast majority of Ukrainians still firmly reject trade. territory for peace.
Ukrainians were the most hopeful last winter ahead of the counter-offensive in the south, opinion polls showed. Trust in all institutions except the military has fallen since then. according to a study by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, one of the country’s leading pollsters. Confidence in the government fell from 74 percent in May to 39 percent in October, the period when the Ukrainian offensive began and then disappeared, the institute found.
Ukraine’s last major military victory, the recapture of the city of Kherson, took place a year ago. Despite months of bloody trench fighting and tens of thousands of casualties, little land has changed hands since then.
This week, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, provided a blunt assessment of the country’s near-term prospects. The economist that the fighting had reached a ‘stalemate’. Mechanized attacks fail, he wrote, and without more advanced technological weapons a new, long phase of war would begin.
It was a conclusion that Andriy Tkachyk, the mayor of the village of Tukhlia, in western Ukraine, had already reached after volunteering to take the bodies of soldiers from the front to their hometowns and organize funerals. In conversations, he said, he heard of difficult, bloody battles to hold positions, and of war-weary soldiers’ complaints about running out of ammunition.
“The guys who are on the front lines are physically and psychologically tired,” Mr. Tkachyk said. “Very tired. This war will last a long time.”
“Frustration is increasing,” he said, including the feeling that poor village boys are dying while citizens from wealthier families in the cities find ways to avoid conscription. Conscription evasion is on the rise as men hide to avoid receiving notices or try to bribe officials at local recruiting centers.
“Every village has graves,” he said. “The situation is bad.”
Ukrainians who were once quick to express healthy skepticism about their government rallied around the flag as full-scale war broke out, boosting confidence in Mr. Zelensky, the military and nearly all the institutions of their threatened state.
That is also fading due to the stalled military advance, the daily shelling and the increasing number of victims.
Trust in Mr. Zelensky, while still shared by a majority of Ukrainians, fell from 91 percent in May to 76 percent in October, the Kiev International Institute of Sociology survey showed. Other polls show Zelensky’s approval rating at 72 percent.
Only 48 percent of Ukrainians say they trust the government-controlled television news channel Telemarafon, which broadcast optimistic coverage of the military operation in the south, the institute’s survey shows. The programming was intended to boost the morale of Ukrainians as their army fought to drive Russian forces from the coast of the Sea of Azov, but the deviation from events on the ground ultimately led to skepticism among Ukrainians.
“We have to be honest,” Anton Hrushetsky, the director of the Kiev institute, said in an interview. “People are becoming pessimistic.”
Stress is increasing, he said, because Ukrainians want to move on with their lives safely but do not see promising prospects.
The widespread sense of insecurity in Ukraine, Mr. Hrushetsky said, is leading Ukrainians to look for someone to blame.
“People don’t describe it as a failure, and they don’t blame the military,” Hrushetsky said of the stalled efforts to regain territory, or, in General Zaluzhny’s words, the “stalemate” in the war.
But anger is growing over domestic government corruption and the country’s Western allies, who the Ukrainians say have delayed weapons deliveries.
A survey commissioned by the European Union shows that the number of Ukrainians who say the West does not want Ukraine to win the war has doubled in the past year from 15 percent to 30 percent.
Fault lines are also emerging in the country’s domestic politics. Those who support Mr. Zelensky are more likely to blame allies, while Mr. Zelensky’s political opponents draw attention to corruption at home.
Small protests broke out in October, highlighting points of tension. Families of missing Ukrainian soldiers pressed the government for answers during a street demonstration in Kiev. And in the capital and other cities, families of soldiers who had been in the army throughout the war protested, demanding that the government remove them from the front. “It is time for others to take action,” they chanted on Maidan Square in Kiev.
Thwarted expectations of military success in the summer largely underlie the trend toward pessimism, the polls show.
After a dark winter last year when Russia targeted power plants and transformer stations, causing power outages, Ukrainians were hopeful when power returned in the spring.
“We said, ‘Well, we did it, everything is over, now there will be a counter-offensive,’” said Andriy Liubka, a Ukrainian novelist. “We had this inspired optimism.”
Now families are hearing from soldiers in the trenches, where autumn rains drench them and “life resembles something from earlier historical eras” of hardship and violence, Mr. Liubka said.
The trenches produce a steady stream of dead and wounded. In their most recent estimate, U.S. officials said in August that about 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war and more than 100,000 had been injured. The Ukrainian government does not provide casualty figures.
Many Ukrainians view with concern the politicization of military aid in the United States, Slovakia, Poland and other countries.
A phase of great fear has begun, Mr. Liubka said.
And yet any concession to Russia risks leaving millions of Ukrainians under occupation and facing possible repression, arrest and execution.
In the village of Blahodatne, in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, school principal Halyna Bolokan deemed it safe enough to reopen the primary school, despite daily explosions in the area. But she did her best to renovate the basement into a bomb shelter, with donations from the community.
“I use strength to put a smile on my face,” she said. “People are now dreaming about our new fallout shelter.”
Serhiy Mykhailyuk, a soldier in the Air Defense Forces, walked with his fiancée, Yekaterina Bordyuk, on a recent stormy autumn day in Kiev. “Of course there is sadness every day that he is not home,” Ms. Bordyuk said. ‘But the war will take a long time, not one, two or three years. We’ve kind of gotten used to it.”
Maria Varenikova reporting contributed.