Weary Ukraine fears war is ‘extremely unlikely’ to end in victory
As the second anniversary of the invasion by Russia approaches, Kyiv shifts its focus to holding on to its territory rather than defeating its enemy.
The gigantic Mother Ukraine statue stands over Kyiv shrouded in a dense fog, an apt metaphor for the country’s dispiriting future as Russia’s invasion grinds on with no end in sight.
The Soviet-era monument is one of Ukraine’s most memorable landmarks. It looks eastwards towards Moscow but lost its hammer-and-sickle emblem this year after officials voted to replace it with Ukraine’s trident coat of arms.
As the second anniversary of the start of the war approaches, Kyiv is finding it far more difficult to impose its sovereignty on the battlefield, with hopes of imminent victory fading and the focus shifting to ensuring that no further land is lost.
From President Zelensky to his military commanders and the residents of bombed-out villages, no one knows how many more years of war Ukraine will have to live through before Russia can be driven from its territory and stopped from bombarding its cities.
“Right now, a victory on the battlefield is extremely unlikely. This war could last for years and years. Russia has the resources for this and their people will put up with it,” said Colonel Roman Kostenko, a commander and MP who is a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s national security, defence and intelligence committee.
The mood is one of grim acceptance rather than defeatism: there is no talk of surrendering to Russia. Yet the atmosphere is very different from this time last year, when a series of stunning successes for the Ukrainian army in the east and south of the country raised hopes of a swift triumph. However, President Putin, seemingly secure at home and brimming with a new-found confidence, is playing a long game.
“We should hope for the best but prepare for the worst. That’s the reality of it,” said Sviatoslav Yurash, who at 27 is Ukraine’s youngest MP, as well as a private in the army. “When you see the front lines, when you see the casualties that we have, the battles we are forced to fight every step of the way, it’s clear that we are here for a long time,” he said after returning from the battlefield to vote in parliament.
Moscow has increased the production of weapons, with factories working around the clock to make them. The Kremlin has also succeeded in replenishing its forces through mobilisation and a military recruitment campaign, despite suffering massive casualties that are believed to be the equivalent of 90 per cent of the size of the army that invaded Ukraine last year.
Ukrainian generals said this week that Russia was on the offensive in the east of the country and that troops were being forced to downsize some military operations because of artillery shortages. “We can’t respond to everything the Russians are throwing at us. It’s as painful as hell,” Yurash said.
The scale of Ukraine’s casualties is classified but there is no longer any attempt to disguise that losses are huge. “I don’t even give the new guys call signs any more. Most of them don’t last long,” a Ukrainian soldier in Kharkiv said, on condition of anonymity.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Zelensky, said that Ukraine’s immediate future could have been far brighter if western countries had been quicker to provide Kyiv with the military assistance that it needed.
“When you are supposed to receive a certain amount of a certain weapon in a month’s time, but it takes eight months, then for those eight months you physically have nothing to do your work with,” he said in his office in Kyiv’s heavily fortified government district.
Podolyak said western democracies still failed to fully realise the threat that Putin posed to international security, warning that it would be a “humiliation” for the United States if the Kremlin emerged victorious in Ukraine.
“Putin has tasted the blood of democracy: not just in Ukraine, but in the wider sense. Until he is destroyed, he will continue,” he said.
He did not hide his frustration at a holdup in Washington of approval for military aid worth $US60 billion ($88bn), after objections from members of the Republican Party. The future of EU military assistance is also in question after a €50 billion ($81bn) package was vetoed by Hungary, Russia’s closest ally in Europe.
“The entire country will be ripped apart in front of their eyes if no solution is achieved – and you will all cry and say ‘I feel so sorry for the Ukrainians who now do not have a state of their own because they were massacred in their droves. Let’s hold a concert for them.’ That’s a normal approach, if you like that – we aren’t against it. Very humanitarian,” Podolyak said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainian defence minister, said this week that he did not believe that Washington would abandon Kyiv in its battle against “the forces of evil”, but Colonel Kostenko, who is a commander fighting in Kherson, said he doubted that any western weapons could now dislodge Putin’s troops from their heavily fortified defensive lines.
“I don’t think there is any weapon right now that can have a strong influence on the outcome of the war. ATACMS [army tactical missile systems] missiles can’t bring about a breakthrough. Warplanes? They can only help us achieve parity,” Kostenko said.
Ukraine has been promised F-16 planes, but these are from the 1970s and Russia has hundreds of more modern jet fighters. “I don’t understand who has it in their head that we can defeat Russia with dozens of F-16s,” he said.
Although he insisted that Ukraine’s military campaign this year had been successful, considering the realities on the ground, he said that its realistic aim for next year should be to avoid losing any more of its territory and carry out as many strikes as possible against Russian naval and ground forces.
“We cannot afford to fight symmetrically with the Russians, go on attacks like the Russians, lose people like the Russians or recruit people like they do. We need to look for ways where we lose 10 times fewer people than they do. That’s the only way we have a chance because, mathematically, we will simply run out of people faster than they will.”
Zelensky said at his annual press conference on Tuesday that the army had asked for an additional 500,000 civilians to be mobilised. When Russia’s invasion began, long queues formed at military recruitment offices as people sought to sign up. Today (Saturday), many of those initial volunteers have been killed or injured, or are simply exhausted – and Ukraine is struggling to replace them.
Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst, said: “Mobilisation is a very big challenge. Many Ukrainians are patriotic but at the same time they are afraid for their relatives, for their children, and don’t want them to fight.”
The Times
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