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‘We understand what war is now’ Fortitude, fatigue, and facing reality in Ukraine’s east

Source: Meduza

Three years of all-out war has taken a massive toll on Ukraine. For villages in the Kharkiv region, more than two years have passed since Ukrainian troops pushed out occupying forces. But with Russian troops attacking along the northeastern border and pushing towards the strategic railway town of Kupyansk, the front line remains too close for comfort. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to leave the region and there’s a pervasive sense of exhaustion among those who stayed — one that resonates with people across the country. Indeed, recent surveys show that public opinion has shifted, with roughly half of Ukrainians supporting a quick negotiated peace. President Volodymyr Zelensky has even expressed hopes that Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 will bring about a “faster” end to the war. In a dispatch from the Kharkiv region, journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska reports on Ukraine’s fortitude, battle fatigue, and readiness to face reality.

Yevhen Shapoval’s work day began in a bomb shelter. He let the women, a few co-workers and clients, go in first. Before they closed the door of the small underground room, the sound of an incoming missile echoed through the village. 

This time, it didn’t hit Prykolotne, a rural settlement in the Vilkhuvatska hromada, where Shapoval heads the military administration. The missile landed 15 kilometers (nine miles) away, in Velykyi Burluk, destroying a building next to what used to be a local secondary school. At the site later that day, a woman working at the market, 60-year-old Svitlana, tells me that it’s unclear whether the rocket was Russian or Ukrainian. “Politics is a very delicate matter, you know,” she says. 

When I ask why Ukraine would bomb its own territory, Svitlana pauses. “Russian troops used to be based here,” she replies. And then adds, “I don’t know.” 

Both Prykolotne and Velykyi Burluk are located in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, near the border with Russia. When Shapoval was sent to Prykolotne from Kharkiv in December 2022, two months after Ukrainian forces liberated the region from Russian occupation, his main goal was to secure Ukraine’s control over the territory by winning the hearts and minds of locals.

According to Shapoval, there’s little sympathy for Russia among residents today. “When a Russian bomb hits your house, you draw a lesson,” he says. “Some people simply support the authorities, no matter who’s in power. Yes, there are some zhduny — people waiting for Russia — [and] collaborators. But in general, people have united for Ukraine. In the public understanding, Kharkiv is Ukraine much more than it was at the beginning of the war.”

‘Bombs and missiles will fly’

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Vilkhuvatska hromada had more than 6,000 residents. Today, the local population has fallen to less than 2,000, Shapoval says. According to the official, around a thousand people left for Russia before its forces retreated from the Kharkiv region in the fall of 2022, fearing what Ukraine might do to collaborators and traitors. Others left for the west. Those who stayed are mostly elderly; the border area is no place for the youth.

Back in his office, Shapoval switches on the TV and searches for Russian propaganda channels. Today is a good day: none are available. In the past, Shapoval says, Ukrainian TV networks were rarely accessible in the area and most radio stations transmitted Moscow’s worldview in Russian. Now, the TV speaks Ukrainian.

“I never communicated in the Ukrainian language before the full-scale war. Now, I only speak Ukrainian — even here, a place where 75 percent of the population is Russian-speaking. The situation is changing in a cultural and linguistic sense,” he says. “But we understand that we won’t fix what was broken for 30 years in a year.”

Be that as it may, the change is palpable. The default language in the streets, in shops, and on buses is now Ukrainian, even if many people are still struggling to switch. Even those who mainly speak Russian or surzhyk — a Russian-Ukrainian pidgin — make genuine efforts to mix in more Ukrainian words.  

The Ukrainian state is also making its presence felt. Unlike in other regions, where Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy system have led to rolling blackouts, here, 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Russia’s state border, electricity supply continues uninterrupted. Shapoval confirms this is to show that Ukraine cares about those living in the east. The authorities also opened a newly renovated Administrative Services Center in Prykolotne last year, a shiny bright-green office where locals can sort out a range of issues. Ukraine’s largest private delivery company, Nova Poshta, opened a brand new mobile branch in the village, as well.

When I ask if he worries that Ukraine might lose the Vilkhuvatska hromada again, Shapoval is adamant that another occupation, or even a ground offensive, is unlikely here. Ukrainian forces are building fortifications, minefields have already been laid, and border guards monitor the area. 

“Bombs and missiles will fly, but the Russians don’t have the resources to conduct an offensive operation here,” he maintains. “Yes, there’s constantly something happening near Kupyansk. But this is just to terrorize the civilian population, so that everyone is afraid; to push the government to negotiate and persuade it to agree to terms that would be beneficial to Russia.”

‘Our common pain’

As 2024 draws to a close, there are two words you hear most often both in Kyiv and in Ukraine’s frontline regions. The first is “exhaustion” and the second — “reality.”

After nearly three years of fighting a full-scale war and with victory nowhere in sight, Ukrainians are tired. In the liberated eastern regions, like the Vilkhuvatska hromada, Ukraine has shown it’s here to stay and achieved what it needed most: its citizens’ loyalty. Now, with the frontline shifting only slightly, many feel it is time to abandon fantasies fueled by early successes and motivational state propaganda that distorts the real picture; to focus on what’s achievable today — and what can be done to ease the burden of war. 

According to Gallup’s latest surveys, 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible, up from just 27 percent in 2023. Whereas last year, 63 percent of Ukrainians favored continuing to fight until victory, fatigue has since kicked in, with support for fighting until Ukraine wins falling below 50 percent in all regions surveyed. Moreover, 52 percent of Ukrainians who favor negotiations with Russia are open to making territorial concessions to secure a quick peace deal — a notion that’s been taboo since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. 

In Prykolotne, people choose their words carefully when discussing how the war might end. They understand that the sacrifice of those who gave their lives for the fight against Russia should be respected. But the sense of fatigue and the need to face reality come up in every conversation. 

“Let’s at least start some kind of a negotiation process, so that the shelling stops a little bit,” says Oksana Selutina, a 37-year-old employee at the new Administrative Services Center. When I ask if she would agree to relinquishing the territories Russia has occupied since 2014 — Crimea and parts of Donbas — if it meant that the war would end sooner, Selutina takes a moment to think. 

“I can’t answer this question. Our defenders gave their lives [and] children were left without parents precisely because they were defending our country from occupation, from a foreign government. It’s our common pain,” she says slowly. “But on the other hand, perhaps the people who’ve been under occupation for the past 11 years don’t want us there. There are already children who went through and finished school under a foreign flag.” 

“Either this war continues for another 15 years at this pace, with us advancing a meter a month, or it will end with some sort of negotiations,” Selutina concludes.

Yulia, 27, one of a few young people still left in the village, agrees. “It’s not that we want to let go of the occupied territories, but people are just tired. Our soldiers did everything for the war not to spill over further than necessary. But it has reached us. And we understand what [war] is now,” she says. “In the first year, there was still enthusiasm. But at some point you need to face the world without all the illusions and fantasies.”

‘People just want to live’

A hundred kilometers away, in Kharkiv’s suburbs, 27-year-old Valentyn is facing his own reality. For the past few months, he hasn’t left the house during the day. He allows himself only brief walks after 7:00 p.m. and orders most of his groceries online. Since he lives alone, in an apartment he’s currently renovating himself, most of his social interaction happens online, too. 

An economist now training to become a programmer, Valentyn is one of thousands of young Ukrainian men hiding from mobilization squads, for fear of being forcefully drafted and sent to the front. To compensate for losses, the Ukrainian army aims to mobilize another 160,000 soldiers, but it has found this goal difficult to achieve. 

“For the first few months of the war, we really understood that state institutions and society were under attack. Now, the war has moved to a different phase. There’s no threat to our statehood, we have a legitimate government in place, and people have accumulated fatigue. We’ve moved from reactive to critical thinking and begun to ask questions,” Valentyn says, speaking quickly and emotionally. 

Valentyn says he’s not just afraid of dying — he’s not ready to die in vain. “You can be ready to die if you believe in an idea of the future [and] that sooner or later something will change for the better. But I simply don’t believe it anymore based on what I see,” he explains.  

Valentyn believes Russia is unlikely to make any significant territorial gains — and he’s also not ready to die for Crimea and Donbas. “I know that these territories will return to Ukraine through diplomatic talks, because any dictatorship sooner or later falls apart. And so will Putin's regime, as unexpectedly as the Soviet Union did,” he says. “People just want to live. They can call us whatever they want: philistines, consumers. This is the reality. And our government is not only ignorant, it’s out of touch with reality.”

Gennadiy Druzenko, who heads the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, one of Ukraine’s largest teams of civilian medics, goes even further. In his opinion, the situation at the front now is “the complete opposite” of Ukraine’s “era of successes” in 2022. “Due to maneuverability, creativity, motivation, [and] with very minimal equipment, we drove the Russians out of a large part of Ukraine,” he recalls. But this changed in 2023, after the battle of Bakhmut, “which we held on to only because we wanted heroism,” he says. 

“The Ukrainian army has become a small Soviet army. And a small Soviet army will never defeat a large Soviet army — an army that’s stupid, doesn’t value its people, [and] doesn’t analyze the reasons for its defeats,” Druzenko continues. “Zelensky chose for Ukraine to be a small Russia. That is, the government doesn’t communicate with society, corruption is thriving, and fewer and fewer people understand why the war should continue in this format.”

Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential elections didn’t spark optimism in Druzenko either. Ukraine is fighting for democracy, human rights, and dignity — values and ideas that are foreign to the incoming American president, he says. “We won’t join NATO not because of Russia but because of Trump’s America,” Druzhenko laments. “There will be no fair peace, no reparations, and no punishment for war criminals.” 

While this would clearly be a bad outcome for Ukraine, Druzhenko believes the alternative would be worse. “Ukraine doesn’t stand between a good and a bad option, but between a bad option and a disaster,” he says. “Motivation has broken down, there is less and less faith in victory, and the military-political leadership hasn’t voiced other goals of the war. What shall we fight for?”

In the weeks since Trump’s election, President Zelensky has tentatively acknowledged that Ukraine will have to reclaim its occupied regions through diplomacy, while remaining adamant that the country can’t legally surrender territory to Russia. Trump’s plans for ending the war remain unclear, and whether Putin would be willing to let go of Ukraine, even temporarily, is also an open question. But many in Ukraine clearly have reservations about the war’s status quo. 

“I was visiting relatives [in another part of Ukraine] and a shop door slammed. I immediately put my hands up to cover my head,” Yulia says, gesturing as if to protect herself from shelling. “They all looked at me in shock. People don’t understand, [but] we shouldn’t judge. We also didn’t understand until it reached us.”