‘The price is unimaginably high’

A dispatch from Kyiv, where Ukrainians are coming to terms with the third year of all-out war with Russia

In mid-April, just weeks after lowering the conscription age from 27 to 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law tightening the country’s mobilization procedures. Shortly after, the U.S. approved nearly $61 billion worth of economic and military aid for Ukraine. However, even Ukrainian officials admit that this long-awaited aid package won’t be enough to solve all the army’s problems on the front lines. Journalist Wiktoria Bieliaszyn, who covers Eastern Europe for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, traveled to Kyiv to see how politicians, experts, and ordinary Ukrainians are coping amid the third year of all-out war with Russia. With permission from the journalist and Gazeta Wyborcza, Meduza shares an English-language translation of her dispatch from the Ukrainian capital.

“Fuck the Ruskies! Fuck the war!” Dmytro exclaims, knocking a cup off the table as he gestures angrily, or maybe defeatedly. He apologizes immediately. In his opinion, it isn’t appropriate to swear or talk about the war in the presence of women and children. There are four of us in the compartment of the Kyiv–Chełm train: Dmytro, myself, 25-year-old Olena, and four-year-old Max.

Dmytro believes we three are from a different world. We haven’t seen what he’s seen. We haven’t had to flee from an occupied city, knowing that one wrong move could cost us our lives. And if not our lives, then our well-being because, he says, Russian soldiers didn’t always kill people — more often they “simply tortured” them. They also went through people’s phones, and if they found anything that even slightly aroused suspicion, they’d start the beatings and torture all over again. They demanded gratitude for bringing “the Russian world” and “order” with them, he says.

We only know about the war from the media or the stories of those who’ve returned from the front and only feel it when we go down into a bomb shelter in Kyiv, so we see everything differently, Dmytro continues. And we still believe in victory because we haven’t seen the corpses or heard the screams of those being tortured.

Dmytro doesn’t believe in victory, although he very much wants to live to see it. “But when you’re over 70, you have no more hopes or illusions left,” he says. Ukraine won’t manage on its own, he believes, and the West isn’t helping enough. Although it’s hard to say if it’s still even possible to reverse the course of the war, he concedes. In his opinion, the real chance to win was squandered at the start of the full-scale invasion. But back then, the West “was afraid, waited, counted on negotiations with Putin, compromises.” And now, Ukraine’s allies are tired of the war; they have their own problems. They’re still talking to Volodymyr Zelensky, but “it’s more like a person leaning over a beggar”:

I feel awful for our guys. Many have died, and still more will die because, while the West is making up its mind, Putin is buying rockets and drones, putting the economy on a war footing, and mobilizing more and more groups of helpless people who will die if he orders them to.

But let’s get some sleep; in a few hours, there’s the border and the changeover to Warsaw. Will we need to show our phones to the border guards? No? Will they check our suitcases? Well, the Russians checked everything. Goodnight, ladies. Goodnight, little boy. Peaceful skies to us all.

‘Peace with Putin is impossible’

The Ukrainian authorities have a different view of the situation than Dmytro. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to the Zelensky administration, told me that he trusts the West — and that Ukraine’s allies fully grasp the threat Russia poses.

At the same time, the politician admits that when the West delays decisions on aid for Ukraine, his “jaw involuntarily clenches.” In those moments, he starts to feel like not all of Ukraine’s partners understand how serious the consequences of such delays are.

So, Podolyak keeps patiently explaining to Ukraine’s allies that life in a country at war means constant fear, pain, worry, and uncertainty. Although he acknowledges that those watching the fighting from thousands of miles away will never be able to fully understand it.

At the same time, some Ukrainians joke that you’re safer in downtown Kyiv than in America’s White House, despite the attacks and frequent air raid sirens. But even in the capital, which is far from the front, the war is immediately evident. There are checkpoints, soldiers, men and women with weapons, children playing on half-destroyed Russian military equipment, dimmed lights in the windows of buildings, and the government quarter is plunged into complete darkness for safety. The starkest reminder, though, is the veterans who’ve returned from the front — some without arms or legs.

The military hospital is just a few miles from the city center. The first thing that catches your eye when you pass through the gates is a fresco depicting the soldier from Snake Island who famously told a Russian warship to “go fuck” itself.

Observation posts are set up on the hospital grounds. In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, when the Russian army tried to capture Kyiv, doctors took up weapons and left the operating rooms to guard the hospital. But today, the front line is much further away, and with only one operation on his schedule, lead trauma surgeon Petro Nikitin finds time to talk.

Fifty-nine-year-old Nikitin often has to “reassemble” soldiers who’ve been blown up by mines. Junior doctors recoil in horror at the sight of them, says the surgeon. Nikitin can’t remember the last time he saw a soldier who just needed a bullet removed. He notes that this “says a lot about the nature of this war.” He thinks there hasn’t been an army with so many soldiers with severed limbs since World War II — because a mine, grenade, or shell fragment damages multiple bones and tissues simultaneously. And when a patient comes in with injuries to the legs, chest, abdomen, and arms, you have to decide what to operate on first.

Nikitin admits he doesn’t always know what to say to the mother or wife of a soldier he’s nursed back to health. Some of them don’t thank him, but ask him, with anger and despair, if he realizes what he’s done, since now “they’ll send the young man back to the front.” The surgeon doesn’t judge soldiers who don’t want to go back to war. And he’s afraid to ask a soldier who’s unhappy he was healed what he has been through.

But there are also those who are eager to get back to the front. As soon as they recover, they leave for the combat zone and send Nikitin photos of themselves in uniform. Nikitin doesn’t know how to feel about this either. For him, war is “something unnatural for a human being.” Maybe, he reasons, it’s worth listening to the soldiers who talk about their right to demobilization and rest. At the same time, Nikitin understands that Ukraine has no way out. It has to win. “Peace with Putin is impossible,” he says. “You can’t even try to make a deal with the Kremlin.”

Mykola Kapitonenko, a political scientist and associate professor at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv’s Institute of International Relations, concurs. During our conversation, he immediately points out that it will be harder for the Ukrainian authorities to conduct a wave of mobilization now than it was at the beginning of the full-scale war. The Ukrainian army needs hundreds of thousands of soldiers to replenish its ranks this year, Kapitonenko explains. But those who wanted to fight, “the most principled and motivated,” have already gone to the front as volunteers. Kapitonenko thinks that back then, few of them understood that they’d have to fight for years.

‘Both civilians and combatants need support’

The war is no longer about liberating territories but about holding the front line, and finding people willing to volunteer for that task is much more difficult, Kapitonenko continues. Although Ukrainians aren’t willing to make any concessions to Russia, Kapitonenko says many prefer to “defend territories from the couch rather than from the trenches.” He thinks that if this weren’t true, there would still be lines at military enlistment offices.

Sociologist Yevhen Holovakha, the director of the Institute of Sociology at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, says he sees the same trend. Optimistic predictions about the 2023 summer counteroffensive led to fairly serious disappointment in Ukrainian society when the Armed Forces didn’t achieve the results everyone was counting on, explains Holovakha. Ukrainians had to accept the fact that the Russian army couldn’t be defeated so quickly. And this realization affects people’s mental and physical health. Things like the drop in living standards due to the war, chronic stress, and the experience of loss (many have lost loved ones on the front lines) don’t foster “patriotic fervor,” Holovakha adds.

Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a lawmaker from the Ukrainian opposition party European Solidarity, is also convinced that the authorities will have problems with mobilization. “I can’t say that it’s a simple situation,” he explains. “Volunteers, real Ukrainian patriots who answered the call of the heart and decided to join the army, are either fighting on the front lines or have been killed. Now, our task is to mobilize even more people to defend our homeland against Russian aggression.”

Kniazhytskyi believes that this process achieving any degree of success will depend on several factors, including the support of Western countries. “If Ukrainians see and feel [this support], their motivation increases,” he says. But he emphasizes that it’s equally important for Ukrainians to “feel that the government is taking care of them”:

Training is essential to prepare people for combat. It’s vital to ensure financial security for soldiers and their families so they can be certain that if something happens, their loved ones won’t be left with nothing. Both civilians and combatants need support to cope with loss and grief.

Twenty-one-year-old Valeriy, from Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region, isn’t subject to mobilization. Still, he tries to be as inconspicuous as possible. He’s convinced that right now, any man can be taken right off the street and sent to a training ground.

Valeriy doesn’t want to fight because he doesn’t know how and doesn’t think training can change that. He admits that his conscience “torments” him and says he often asks himself whether it’s fair that others are sleeping in a trench while he’s “in a clean and comfortable bed.” At the same time, he remembers acquaintances telling him that there’s “chaos and confusion” in the army and sometimes even new recruits are “thrown into hell.” He adds that he doesn’t want to come back from the front with a severe injury, recalling a classmate whose lung was pierced by a bullet.

Olesya, a 30-year-old from Kyiv, also worries about mobilization. She’s afraid for her husband who, she says, has a “fragile psyche.” In war, you’re not just at risk of losing your life, arm, or leg — you could also suffer psychological damage. And this, according to Olesya, is the worst thing that can happen. She talks about how her friend’s father-in-law, who spent many months on the front lines, “lost his mind.” When he was sent home after an injury, no one could understand why sometimes he was shocked that the people around him were alive.

Paying an unimaginable price

Ukrainians aren’t “fatigued” by the war, asserts Anna Shyichuk, the head of the psychological support program at the Right to Protection Charitable Foundation. “Fatigue” implies a person can rid themselves of its source, but it’s impossible to take a break from the war. The body and mind are constantly on alert, always ready for the next explosion or air raid siren. According to Shyichuk, one of the main sources of psychological distress is the feeling of uncertainty: no one knows how long hostilities will last or how the war will end.

When asked how someone can try to understand what Ukrainians feel, a psychotherapist from Kyiv, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, proposed a thought experiment: Imagine waking up one morning to find an intruder with an axe in your home. “Fueled by emotions, you’re capable of using almost anything as a weapon. You muster the will and the strength to drive them out of your apartment. But what do you do when the same person comes over with an axe every morning for two years?”

Gennadiy Druzenko, the co-founder and president of the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, admits that he increasingly finds himself wondering how justified Volodymyr Zelensky’s words about being ready to fight “to the last soldier” are — and whether this fight is worth “so many human lives.”

“Every square kilometer is costing more and more,” Druzenko says. “If a hundred square kilometers are liberated every day, that’s okay. Then, you might think that war is war — it kills, it maims. But fighting for meters, not kilometers? It’s senseless. We need to fight within the boundaries we can defend.”

He also sees other actions taken by the Ukrainian authorities as missteps: the “fetishization” of borders, corruption, improper investment in the military-industrial complex, and too much dependency on the West. “We can’t wait for drones,” Druzenko insists. “We need to produce them ourselves.”

About 60 percent of Ukrainians continue to support Zelensky and more than 90 percent trust the army, says sociologist Yevhen Holovakha. But there are those who believe that Ukraine could become safer and more stable if it were led by a person who fought on the front lines. For example, former Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who was removed from his post in early February 2024. This dismissal sparked much debate in Ukraine and aroused suspicions that Zelensky had ousted Zaluzhnyi due to the commander’s growing popularity.

However, Holovakha points out that neither Zelensky nor anyone else will answer people’s questions about the future. A Ukrainian politician who spoke with me on condition of anonymity admits that “Ukrainians were seduced by promises of a bloodless and easy victory.” This conviction, which in the first year of the war became a sort of driving force for both society and the Ukrainian army, ultimately weakened the feeling of unity. The politician thinks that Ukrainians, pleased with the initial successes, shifted the responsibility for victory onto the military and politicians — and concluded that the war wouldn’t affect everyone.

This kind of attitude is especially evident in Kyiv. A journalist from the capital, who asked for anonymity, admits that he has “mixed feelings” when he sees men of conscription age in pubs and restaurants “enjoying civilian life.” If you glance into random establishments, you’ll see families, couples, and groups of coworkers. And on a Saturday evening at the popular Drunk Cherry bar in downtown Kyiv, it’s hard to believe that there’s a war going on close by. However, uniformed military personnel sometimes come in to warm up, and at around 11:00 p.m., the staff asks guests to disperse: “Sorry, curfew is in effect.”

Political scientist Mykola Kapitonenko notes that Ukrainians’ attitudes toward the war and victory largely depend on how close they are to the front line. For those who live near the combat zone, a day without shelling is already a small victory. The greater the distance, the higher the demands and expectations. Some residents of Ukrainian regions far from the front, for example, not only demand a return to the 1991 borders but are also still convinced that the war should end with “Russia’s collapse.”

* * *

Do Ukrainians believe in victory? According to sociologist Yevhen Holovakha, 67 percent aren’t willing to make any concessions to Russia. While this is quite a significant number, in 2022 almost 90 percent of respondents gave this answer, and in 2023, 84 percent.

“What comes next?” I ask each person I interview. “We don’t have a choice. We can either fight for every square meter and remain Ukraine, or stop fighting and vanish, because Putin denies us the right to exist,” is more or less the answer everyone gives.

Olena, the passenger on the Kyiv–Chełm train, wants to believe in victory because “otherwise, there’s no point in living.” But she fears it may never come. “The Russians have everything: new weapons, old Soviet-era weapons, people they can endlessly mobilize. We have none of that,” says the Ukrainian.

Twenty-one-year-old Valeriy also finds it difficult to believe in victory, though he stresses that there’s no acceptable alternative. Periodic supply problems from the West undermine his faith. And Russia, in his opinion, will always be able to get what it needs and throw “prisoners, Tatars, and Buryats, about whom no one gives a damn” into battle as “cannon fodder.”

Asked to describe the day of Ukraine’s victory, Mykhailo Podolyak thinks for a long time, then answers solemnly: “It will be both a joyful and a sad day. The price Ukraine is paying is unimaginably high. Only when the war ends will we fully realize this.”

Reporting by Wiktoria Bieliaszyn for Gazeta Wyborcza