Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are alive, in a distorted, battered but very real sort of way. Not counting the soldiers who populate what have been garrison cities since 2022, around 90,000 people still live there. They are drinking coffee on the terrace of a café, waiting in line at the post office or grabbing groceries at the supermarket, passing by municipal workers cutting the grass around the poles of the anti-drone nets. One shoemaker working a stone’s throw from the deserted train station counted his blessings: he had an intact flat, gas, electricity, and few expenses besides food. If gas had been cut immediately at the beginning of the invasion, he probably would have left, he said. But he had long grown accustomed and would stay as long as he had that trinity: an intact flat, gas and electricity.

That process through which the Russian army kills a city is familiar by now, dozens of Ukrainian towns and cities having already gone through it. It is a gradual suffocation, slow and, because the Russian offensive never truly stopped, seemingly inexorable. It’s not linear, however: late last year, I visited a town in the Zaporizhzhia region that, up to that point, had been almost entirely untouched by war — the first Russian long-range drone had only hit the town a week before my arrival in October. Given the pace of the Russian advance at the time however, I fully expected that, by the next summer, Novomykolaivka would be only a handful of kilometers from the frontline and fully ravaged. Instead, the Russian offensive stalled and the city remains some 20 kilometers from the frontline (same as when I last came there in December), hit by long-range drones and gliding bombs every week but still, somehow, teetering on the edge between city and battlefield.

According to the Ukrainian war monitoring project DeepState, Russian forces are now fighting some 13 kilometers away from the eastern outskirts of Kramatorsk and a similar distance from Sloviansk (both cities stand just 5 kilometers away from each other across a hill).

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There was a time when the line that separated city from battlefield was a bit more clearly defined: back in 2022 and 2023, civilian evacuation groups (and the journalists that tagged along) could drive within a kilometer or two of Russian positions to pull out residents. That was before drones began to dominate the battlefield and the notion of “kill zone” entered common parlance.

It is nowadays such an incremental process that it’s become nearly impossible to say when exactly a city stops being a city. It is, again, not linear, and by all accounts the pace at which life in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk is getting worse has accelerated in the past few weeks. But there is a litany of signs, some obvious and some more subtle, that can be used to make the chronicle of this slow agony: in Kramatorsk, one could start in November last year, with the closure of the local train station that marked the severance of the last railway link between Ukrainian-held Donbas and the rest of Ukraine. At around the same time, the first Russian FPV drones began roaming the city. I’ve already mentioned the anti-drones nets that began to be set up en masse this spring, inside the city and over the roads leading in and out. I don’t know when the city’s firefighting trucks began wearing those Mad Max-esque suits of armour, metal cages and skirts of thick rubber padding to protect their flanks. But they also point at a city becoming “unsuitable for life” — an expression often used in Ukrainian or Russian that makes those frontline spaces sound like distant, hostile planets.

The last maternity hospital in Donbas closed last month in Sloviansk, as local authorities began expanding the list of streets subjected to the mandatory evacuation of children. Discreetly, military headquarters left the city as stabilization points — small field hospitals usually found in villages across the frontline — moved in. An NGO specialized in evacuations of civilians started to move people out from Kramatorsk and Sloviansk itself, after years during which the cities had been places of refuge for Donbas resident fleeing the Russian advance. Local authorities decided this month to stop trash collection in some of Kramatorsk’s southern and eastern districts, the most exposed to drone strikes. Russian FPV drones went from an exceptional presence late last year to a daily threat in recent weeks.

There are other markers of impending doom that Kramatorsk and Sloviansk haven’t yet gone through: the closure of cities’ last Nova Poshta post offices, the general call for civilians to evacuate or the enforcement of a stringent, 3pm-to-11am curfew signaling the battlefield has finally taken over.

I don’t think you can really see a city die. There’s already destruction in Kramatorsk, supermarkets and apartment buildings gutted by gliding bombs and carcasses of vehicles hit by drones. But it’s not yet overwhelming and it is still happening side by side with this approximation of normal life. Nor is it being ignored yet: blown-out windows are still covered with cardboard or even replaced, firefighters still make the dangerous trip every time a gliding bomb leaves a crater in a residential area.

By the time destruction dominates the landscape, the city has already been dead for a while.

Rather than in the visual signs, then, it’s in the conversations that I could feel the agony of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk most intensely. It’s where the absences become obvious: an official from the emergency service who sent his 17-year-old son to Dnipro two weeks ago as things took a turn for the worse, a local businessman who prepares to join his wife and 7-year-old daughter in Lviv. Another man just lost his job after one of the very last working factories of Kramatorsk finally closed its doors, but fears being forcibly mobilized if he tries to join his wife in Uzhhorod.

It’s also clear in those conversations that many of these people, who have been living with the war for more than four years now and who have gotten used to it even as it came closer, have now started thinking about the end. They have largely stopped making plans beyond the immediate, living day by day until one day, something — a drone or a bomb hitting just a bit too close, the electricity being cut off, a lifelong friend who decides to leave — overcomes the fear of exile and pushes them to leave. Many older men and women, families with no resources, people who already fled once and then came back, decided they would stay no matter what.

I’ve mentioned the shoemaker who had already vowed to stay as long as he had a flat, gas and electricity. The local businessman has emptied his flat — 4 round trips in a minivan over the past couple of weeks — and has already decided he will stay until a long curfew forces him to shut down his cafés.

Near the Kramatorsk train station, a pastor talked about his experience of the past few months: a church hit by a gliding bomb exploding nearby, the evacuation minivan of his congregation also damaged by a drone, the people walking all the way from Druzhkivka to evade the Russian drones, the women from the choir who had finally decided to leave, the air battles between Russian long-range drones and Ukrainian interceptors, how missile strikes had become less common in the past few months, seemingly replaced by gliding bombs and drones…

He had driven to a car repair shop a few days ago and had seen two burned-out cars on the way, wrestled with the fact that some people stayed specifically because the pastor stayed — should he then leave to encourage people to do the same?

“Kramatorsk will hold,” he said. “As long as we’re here as a church, people will stay around us. The entire service sector is still working. My car mechanic is staying here. And all of this allows the soldiers to hold their ground here. They can get dental care, go to the store, or get their cars repaired.” I was struck to hear this after he had laid out with impressive clarity of thought just how bad things were getting. He didn’t really harbor any illusions, but when I asked him a bit later if he still held hope that all of this could stop, that Kramatorsk could avoid meeting the fate of so many other Ukrainian cities, he laughed and said yes. “Yes,” he said again. “I’m not thinking rationally. Rationality tells you that, of course, Kramatorsk will fall in a year, a year and a half perhaps. But I have hope.”

“One on the ballot but two in mind. How Zelenskyy discourages generals from politics”

The headline looks like an impressive case of lede-burying, as it omits the piece’s biggest scoop that Zelenskyy has reportedly been considering holding presidential elections this autumn. Another, smaller scoop is that former general Valery Zaluzhny reportedly told Zelenskyy face-to-face that he would be a candidate in these elections.

Presidential elections in four months? While Zelenskyy has a knack for unexpected announcements, I think it’s fair to remain skeptical here, given the lack of any apparent preparations for such an incredibly complicated process to be held on such short notice. Zelenskyy and his team “seriously discussed” the possibility of a November election, the piece claims—while stopping short of saying a decision has been made.

There’s nevertheless something interesting there. Until now, rumours and official Ukrainian statements about possible elections had always been the result of outside (read: American) pressure. This time, however, the possibility isn’t raised in an attempt to placate Donald Trump, but rather because the Ukrainian leadership believes there is a “window of opportunity” caused by the changes on the frontline and beyond. For Zelenskyy, the view that Ukraine is no longer on the back foot militarily has translated into improving poll numbers, and the temptation to secure a new term now. It’s also hard not to see the passage of the law on the construction of a “National Pantheon” as an indication of Zelenskyy’s growing confidence and pre-electoral positioning.

But all this relies on the “window of opportunity” remaining open long enough (far from a given, something I’ll discuss later in this issue). It would also involve side-stepping huge challenges that would be extremely unlikely to be overcome by the end of the year.

Speaking of which:

“Almost a third of Ukrainians live away from their place of registration, whilst more than five million are living abroad: findings of an OPORA survey”

Election watch NGO “OPORA” just published the results of an ambitious study based on polls done in Ukraine and in European countries hosting significant numbers of Ukrainians, as well as on data from movements of subscribers to Vodafone, one of the biggest mobile carriers in the country.

The figures are as unsurprising as they’re sobering, making it clear that any elections organized quickly would likely only involve those still living inside Ukraine. Nearly half (48%) of Ukrainians living in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic do not plan to come back to Ukraine after martial law is lifted. And while 74% of Ukrainians abroad want to vote in the next elections, only 16% are registered at their local consular office.

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OPORA’s analysis of data showing the movement of 11 million Vodafone subscribers (which they then extrapolated to all Ukrainians) “shows that the state may be significantly underestimating the scale of migration”: 5.2 million Ukrainians went abroad, 1.2 million moved to a different region of Ukraine and 640,000 moved to a different district within their region.

The topic of elections also comes up in this interview of former Odesa overlord Gennadiy Trukhanov, whom Zelenskyy removed last year following a clumsy SBU operation (which involved releasing documents about Trukhanov’s alleged Russian citizenship that investigative journalist Christo Grozev convincingly showed were fake):

“Never been a citizen of the Russian Federation”: an interview with Gennadiy Trukhanov

Trukhanov claims in the interview that his removal came because the Ukrainian leadership was preparing elections and needed the powerful Odesa mayor out. That may be, though it’s generally clear that Zelenskyy’s former chief of staff Andriy Yermak was very keen to get rid of independent regional figures to install his own power brokers. The interview itself points to Trukhanov’s growing confidence that the stripping of his Ukrainian citizenship will be overturned while his popularity in the seaside city remains intact. It is also telling that Trukhanov, while making it clear he considers Russia “an enemy”, insists on Odesa’s uniqueness and Russian language being part of that uniqueness (as he of course knows this is an opinion shared by a significant part of the population in Odesa).

All of this is interesting because it feels like preparations for future political debates. The bout of optimism I mentioned at the beginning of this issue is a much more immediate development.

Readers of this newsletter probably know the tone shift is rooted in Russia’s sputtering battlefield performance as well as the successes that Ukraine’s drones have found beyond the frontline.

There is no doubt that a lot is happening right now, much (but not all) of which is in Ukraine’s favour. You can see this in some of the reporting that my Financial Times colleagues and I have put out in recent weeks: Crimea’s big cities in total blackout after Ukrainian drone strikes; Vladimir Putin’s war machine sputters in drone age; Ukrainian drone campaign chokes Moscow’s lifeline to Crimea

But there is then the question of how to present and discuss these events, with, I think, two main turns of phrase used in the Western coverage: “narrative shift” and “turning point”. The first one implies a more skeptical view, with the underlying idea that the way we talk about the war has changed more than the war itself. Talking of a “turning point” dismisses that implication, describing instead a true, durable change on the battlefield. There are also some middle-of-the-road takes, chief of which has been the idea that Ukraine is no longer losing, though it may not be winning either—a cautious view that embraces a portrayal of a war at a stalemate but with no clear way out.

Looking at the narrative aspect makes sense in a war where perception plays such a big role and where the Ukrainian leadership has made huge efforts to project confidence in order to secure support. Even before Ukraine’s “middle-strike” campaign began having serious effects in Crimea, Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been pushing hard the idea that Russia’s military was on the back foot thanks to the tremendous casualties Ukraine was reportedly inflicting on Russian troops. This wasn’t particularly convincing until the end of the winter.

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But the situation on the ground changed and caught up to the narrative. Compared to previous moments of optimism (like after Operation Spiderweb last year), Ukraine is now enjoying successes both on the frontline and in the rear in a sustained rather than one-off manner. Russian advances have been stalling for at least three months, while Ukrainian middle-range drones have been pounding the Novorossiya highway for two months straight now. Strikes on Russian refineries are also now happening on a weekly basis. This is new, and significant.

It also means that the positive spin has been given a huge boost and has, in the mouths of some officials and outside observers, once again overtaken the reality on the ground—with the idea that Ukraine is not simply “not losing” but is outright winning, that the Russian population has begun to see the war for what it is and will — eventually— pressure Putin to end it.

It is undeniable that Ukraine is, militarily speaking, now in a better situation than at any point since 2023. It’s also a fact that Russia is facing problems (particularly on the economic front) it didn’t really have to deal with for the first four years of its invasion. But then comes the “now what” question—and it is also evident that there isn’t a clear path to the end of hostilities yet. The hope is still largely pinned on Putin finally coming to his senses and going for a ceasefire, while his latest statements have made it clear that he is, if anything, becoming increasingly delusional and focused on his conquest of Donbas.

My feeling now is that of a war becoming more and more muddled, no longer following a slow but seemingly inexorable trajectory. Kyiv has embraced the “turning point” narrative but has also been more careful, describing the current moment as a less dramatic “window of opportunity”. Even the accurate battlefield assessment of a stalling Russian military conceals the fact that one of the few parts of the frontline where Russia is still advancing also happens to be the most strategically significant.

Eight months ago, I wrote this:

But there are a lot of people in Ukraine who can’t afford the luxury of wishful thinking and worry about this current ‘stable instability’ collapsing in the other direction: with faster and faster Russian advances as Ukrainian manpower woes, the methodical destruction of Ukrainian logistics and targeting of drone pilots leads to more and more critical situations all along the front and sees Ukrainian defenses crumble.

I do think this was wrong—or at least, that this worst-case scenario is increasingly unlikely, despite Ukraine’s constant manpower problems.

But I also wrote this:

Yet these slow, grinding assaults have now all coalesced into a situation where Russian forces have entered or reached the outskirts of at least five crucial urban strongholds: Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad, Kostiantynivka, Lyman, Siversk and Kupyansk.

Of those five strongholds, two (Pokrovsk and Siversk) are now under firm Russian control, while the fall of a third (Kostiantynivka) is looking all but inevitable. We’re currently seeing the opening phase of the battle for Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two major cities of Ukrainian-held Donbas. The Russian army will not be able to take these cities anytime soon and will resort to destroying them. What happens at that point — diplomatically and politically — is now, to me, the biggest question.

To begin this issue’s selection of interesting stories from across Ukraine, I first wanted to highlight and praise this piece by Realna Gazeta, a Ukrainian regional outlet exiled from Luhansk since 2014, which wrote this week about the Ukrainian drone strike on a college dormitory in the Russian-occupied town of Starobilsk, Luhansk region:

“There were students there. What’s up with the discussion about the strike in occupied Starobilsk?”

Russian authorities said at least 21 people, most of them students from a professional college, were killed in the attack. Ukraine’s General Staff said it hit a headquarters of the Russian ‘Rubicon’ drone unit and denied having hit “civilian infrastructure”. Multiple claims have been made by Ukrainian pundits or on social media that the students reportedly killed did not exist or, alternatively, that they were training to become drone pilots.

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In such a tense atmosphere, it’s all the more commendable of Realna Gazeta to focus its story on what is known and dismiss what is clearly wrong: yes, “the dead are real people”, as proven by still accessible Vkontake pages; no, there’s no evidence that military units were stationed there or were hit in the strike (though Realna Gazeta points out of that several parts of the university were blocked to journalists present and local authorities are clamping down hard on the publication of footage showing attacks); no, a document claiming that a Russian brigade was using the dormitory almost certainly isn’t authentic; yes, Russian propaganda is exploiting the tragedy to the fullest, bringing foreign journalists on location in order to craft the narrative; no, there’s no evidence that the students were being trained as drone operators.

“People who now live in the occupied territories are not collaborators by default,” journalist Elena Fetisova writes. “They found themselves under occupation against their will. Girls who grew up in occupied Luhansk studied from Russian textbooks, lived in a media environment devoid of Ukrainian television, and attended schools that the occupiers had reshaped to suit their own purposes. It is strange to demand vivid displays of Ukrainian identity from them. The willingness to deny human dignity to residents of the occupied territories is not patriotism. It is a reproduction of the very logic against which Ukraine is fighting.”

The war continues and expands, in the rear and at the front. The second piece I wanted to bring to your attention looks at the depressingly familiar scenes playing out near the Donbas stronghold of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk:

“How will people in Mykolaivka evacuate if the enemy takes control of all the roads?”

The anxiety and exhausting routine of the war for civilians is summed up in this story by Karachun, a local outlet from the city of Sloviansk. With powerless frustration, journalist Oleksandr Kulbaka writes that the situation unfolding in villages on the outskirts of Sloviansk looks like a “carbon copy” of what has happened so many times before: people staying home until the last moment, when leaving means risking their lives: “then they are forced to leave on foot, walk through fields. And then they regret that they did not agree to go on an evacuation bus when they had the opportunity.” This mix of delusional hope, denial of reality and deep fear of the future (“where am I supposed to go?”, people ask again and again) seem to even extend to the local administration: in Mykolaivka, a village currently ten kilometers from the frontline, municipal workers were, in late April, still “covering broken window and door blocks with tarpaulins, and distributed building materials to residents of apartments affected by shelling”. The story ends with a video of an evacuation from that same village, along a desolate road lined with charred vehicles.

Returning to Ukraine’s rear, the enduring question of how to sustain the war effort and keep mobilizing troops in the face of growing resistance is more acute than ever, despite the more upbeat mood in official circles. One story published last month by Ukrainian outlet Babel provides an interesting insight into this discussion:

‘Policemen are invited to the funerals of the guys they mobilized.’ An interview with the head of the patrol police, Oleksandr Fatsevych, about the shooting in Holosiiv and the system’s problems

The interview came after a man shot six people dead in Kyiv last month. The shooting as well as the police’s alleged failures during the crisis immediately triggered a broader conversation—about Ukrainians’ right to carry weapons (they are very limited, even in peacetime) and about the work of the police during the invasion.

The explanation of the various ways the war has made the work of the police different is more challenging is really what makes this interview so interesting. In a situation where police units are operating on the frontline, Oleksandr Fatsevych has to point out that “the use of weapons by combat units and the use of weapons by police are very different”.

His main focus remains the shortage of personnel, with Fatsevych saying that the patrol police (a specific part of the much bigger Ukrainian police) should have around 20,000 police officers across the country, effectively has 15-16,000, more than 2,000 of which are serving on the front. 3,000 more are “supporting the defense forces”, leaving the cities where they are supposed to work to take positions in quiet border areas, in order to free up military manpower for hotter parts of the frontline. Other war-related tasks stretching the patrol police even thinner include manning checkpoints, escorting sensitive cargo… and working with the military recruiters tasked with enforcing mobilization across the country.

That last job “is reducing trust in the police to zero,” Fatsevych says. Behind the remark is a major issue and the source of a bitter institutional struggle, as newly-appointed Defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov seeks to overhaul the mobilization system. One idea has been to give the police the unenviable task of hauling would-be draftees to the training centers, which would put the police center stage in the mobilization process (rather than the supporting role they have now).

But the massive unpopularity of mobilization in general and of the officers in recruitment centers responsible for the ‘busification’ in particular means that the police is unsurprisingly reluctant to take on this additional burden. In this interview, Fatsevych claims that the work police officers currently do as part of the mobilisation process (they usually shadow recruitment officers and perform checks) is already the cause of a personnel outflow: “Why do police officers and patrol officers resign? We analyzed it. Most resign because they don’t want to be involved in mobilization. We have police officers invited to funerals—to the funerals of the guys they mobilized. The head of the district police station, the community police officer and the patrol officer are hated there. They can’t stand it and resign. Some accept their call-up papers and go off to fight.”

Another, entirely different topic has also grabbed headlines in Ukraine this past month:

“‘More Indians with suitcases.’ Why Ukrainians fear migrant workers, who is fueling the panic, and what the numbers say”

Fear of migrant workers from India or Pakistan flooding the country has been making a surprising amount of waves on Ukrainian social media these past weeks, with outlet Hromadske attempting in this piece to take stock of the situation.

The ‘debate’ has featured a wave of AI-fueled xenophobia, tens of thousands of posts on social media (many of which showed fake pictures of Indians posing in front of Ukrainian street signs) and even protests organized in several cities last weekend (the one in Kyiv only gathered about a hundred people).

Making the outrage all the more peculiar is the fact that, as of right now, it seems to rests on essentially nothing: Hromadske says just shy of 5,000 work permits were given out to foreigners in Ukraine last year, a tiny number that stands in sharp contrast with some message about Ukraine being overwhelmed with Indians. There have been claims that the whole thing is the result of Russian bots pushing the message on social media—while there’s no strong evidence of this yet, it sure doesn’t seem implausible, given how suddenly and for seemingly no reason this topic gathered steam on social networks.

But it’s also clear that this controversy is rooted in the very real anxieties of a broadly conservative society looking with anguish at the demographic cataclysm that Ukraine is facing. The question of whether Ukraine’s demographic deficit should be plugged with migrant workers is really the question of what the country that Ukrainians are fighting for should look like.

The last thing I’d like to discuss in this newsletter is something I’ve brought up before. Twice in this newsletter I wrote about Ukrainian regional outlet Poltavshyna and how, every week since May 2022, it had been publishing a story listing the names and short biographies of soldiers from the Poltava region whose death had been officially reported in the previous seven days. Poltavshyna’s grim count was first mentioned here in June 2023, when I highlighted the Reuters story that brought this initiative to my attention, and then again in January 2024.

A story I’ve been working on has led me to think about death on the battlefield more often than usual, and I wondered a few days ago whether, four years into the invasion, Poltavshyna still ran this count. It does, with the latest story dated May 25 noting that the death of 30 local soldiers had been reported in the last week—the youngest 25 years-old, the oldest 63.

Can this unrelenting and very partial count tell us anything about the war, four years years after Poltavshyna began this work? Could this focus on one region, and therefore one small number of units, highlight the war’s ebb and flow and its transformation? I put together this graph showing the number of Ukrainian soldiers from the Poltava region killed every month since January 2023, according to Poltavshyna’s reporting:

Most striking about this graph is how flat it is. You may discern a few changes, a dip in June 2023 and April/May 2025, the first months of 2023 and of 2025 being particularly deadly, and there’s an apparent upward trend since the end of last year. But it’s not much, and I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from those numbers alone.

No, overall, you can’t really see anything on this graph. Not the fateful 2023 Ukrainian counter-offensive, not the evolving technological war and drone supremacy that has come to define the conflict. The only thing you can see is about 20 soldiers — sometimes closer to 15, sometimes to 30 — dying every week, week after week, for the past 172 weeks.

Back in December last year, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled in a mundane inheritance case that did not register anywhere outside of the country’s judicial database. The lawsuit opposed a woman to her ex-husband (following a short marriage and a divorce settled in 2001). Both had filed inheritance claims after the death of their son, a 22-year-old soldier killed in March 2022 during the siege of Mariupol.

His body had been returned in May that year and buried in Dnipro, but remained unidentified until three months later. The mother filed to receive her son’s inheritance (161,608 hryvnias, or about 3,100 euros, stored on a PrivatBank bank account) in November. Her ex-husband did the same in January 2023. She argued in court the ex-husband had filed the claim past the six-month deadline following the issuance of the death certificate in July, and was therefore not entitled to part of the inheritance.

The judges said that while their son’s death, from a bullet wound to the head, had been first recorded on July 6, 2022, identification had come only on August 12, within the six-month limit. The Supreme Court threw out the case.

The war is everywhere in the thousands of rulings, sentences, decisions and opinions issued daily by the 587 courts dotting Ukraine (excluding the regions occupied by Russia).

There are the well-known sorts of cases—war crimes, collaboration, desertion, stories where the war is setting, cause and consequence all at once. On April 4, the Kharkiv court of appeal ruled on one of thousands of collaboration cases piling up in tribunals of frontline and formerly occupied regions. A teacher had previously been convicted for taking on the position of acting director of a high school in the Russian-occupied Kupyansk district in 2022, and had been sentenced to two years of prison and a five-year ban on education and local government work. She denied the charges and asked for the judges to overturn the sentence, but was rebuffed: the court rejected the appeal and increased the ban on working in education and local government to ten years.

Last month, a court in the Sumy region pronounced a ten-year, in absentia verdict for war crime, another category overwhelming the country’s judicial system (more than 200,000 war crimes investigations have been opened by Ukraine’s prosecutor general). This particular case involved a Ukrainian citizen fighting in the Russian army who had, in the first weeks of the invasion, tortured a woman in an attempt to find out the location of her son, suspected of being a Ukrainian soldier.

The Donetsk native (known by his call-sign ‘Medved’, ‘Bear’), had, according to the verdict, barged into a house of a village in the Sumy region in March 2022, threatened the woman, her husband and their grandson before seizing their phones. The verdict includes a dry, harrowing description of the family’s ordeal: “during the search, servicemen of the Russian armed forces fired into the well, thinking that the son could be hiding there [...] They then said they would take the grandson, a minor at the time, with them. The victim asked to be taken instead of the child, and said goodbye to her husband and grandson, because she thought she would not return alive”. She was then taken into an armored vehicle to a frozen pond and submitted to mock executions.

Other rulings give a glimpse into the immense strain that four years of war have put Ukrainian society under.

I came across three verdicts issued in the past couple of weeks in three strikingly similar cases of Ukrainians recruited by Russian intelligence to destroy strategic infrastructure or military vehicles. The three, unrelated attacks all took place within a few weeks of each other, in March and early April of last year. Initial recruitment always happened on the Telegram messaging app and, in two of the three cases, as the defendants were looking for paid work. On the orders of their handlers, one tried to burn a military car; another to destroy the transformer of a hydroelectric plant; and the third one to torch the trackside relay cabinet a a train signalisation system. Every time, they filmed the act in order to receive payment—and, in two cases, their interlocutor refused to send the money anyway (arguing in one situation the attacker hadn’t shown their face on the video, and in another that geolocation hadn’t been turned on).

But looking at those three stories side by side is maybe most interesting in the way it highlights the more vulnerable part of Ukraine’s society and Russia’s eagerness to exploit that fragility.

In Kharkiv, a struggling, 2d year student at a technical university was looking for a job and agreed one morning last year to set fire to a military vehicle for 1,000 dollars. The same evening, he found a parked Honda sporting camouflage painting, doused the hood with lighter fuel and struck a match. The owner of the car, a soldier who had just returned from combat duty in Russia’s Kursk region, later sent a letter to the court asking for leniency and saying the student’s father had paid for the damages. The student received a suspended 5-year sentence. Of the three defendants, he’s the only charged for “intentional destruction of property” rather than the much more serious “crime against the national security of Ukraine” and sabotage, though, strangely, the verdict opens by saying that the student, “lacking patriotic convictions”, “decided to embark on a course of unlawful activity and to commit unlawful acts against the foundations of Ukraine’s national security”.

On the banks of the Dnipro river, in central Ukraine, a woman suffering from schizotypal disorder (a mental illness “characterized by thought disorder, paranoia, a characteristic form of social anxiety, derealization”) was convinced by Russian intelligence to attack the nearby hydroelectric powerplant. She failed to cause real damage to the electrical transformer, and was told she wouldn’t get the money unless she attacked the next target, a post office mailbox—where she was ultimately arrested. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison with compulsory psychiatric care.

And in the western city of Lviv, an orphaned, barely-adult refugee from the frontline city of Zaporizhzia clumsily tried to set fire to a railway relay cabinet, only managing to burn paint off the metal box. He quickly confessed, “actively cooperated with the investigation,” entered into a plea agreement with the prosecution, and will only serve one additional year in prison (on top of the year of pretrial detention).

Another, recent judgement really struck me.

The 8,800-word verdict was published last month by a court in a town of the Khmelnytskyi region, in the West of Ukraine. It’s a gruesome read, messy, contradictory and full of gutwrenching little details that cut through the flatness of a judicial document.

It is the tale of a man beaten to death on Christmas Eve, as he and nine other men waited in barracks to be sent to the military the following morning. The trial ended in a guilty verdict and an eight-year prison sentence for the defendant who, like the victim, had just been forcibly mobilised.

The events involved ten men mobilised in the previous days in the town of Shepetivka, as well as the five-or-so officers from the mobilisation center tasked with guarding them. At some point on the evening of December 24, 2024, the men learned they would be sent to the training ground the next day at 4 am. One of them panicked and tried to escape, was caught, tried to bite the finger of a mobilisation officer, was held and beaten—by the guards as well as the defendant. One of the military officers ended up tying the victim’s hands and feet with tape before stuffing a sock in his mouth and, according to two witnesses, giving him “an injection”. A military officer also reportedly told the men they would have to deal with the terrified recruit themselves if they wanted to sleep.

But the man didn’t calm down. The scene repeated itself over the next hour as he tried to escape and was beaten again and again, ultimately lying motionless on the ground between two beds. The flurry of hits left him with 15 broken ribs, among a multitude of other injuries “caused by at least 26 traumatic blows” to the head, chest and back. The court concluded that the defendant had landed the killing blow, a fist to the jaw that knocked the man down and caused him to hit his head on the floor.

The man moaned in agony throughout the night and was barely conscious, maybe fully unconscious (the document isn’t clear), by the time the group was woken up to go to the military unit. He was dressed, at which point one witness saw he had urinated on himself, while another noted “his ear was blue, and there was a red bed sheet under him” (yet another witness previously said he had noticed the man bleeding from one ear). At 4.30 am, he was dragged to the bus, at which point one mobilisation officer finally called an ambulance. The verdict doesn’t say when exactly he died, or whether any mobilisation officers were charged as well.

Then, and finally, there are all the other verdicts, where the war is seemingly absent, or appears as background noise rather than as an active presence.

In March, a court in Chernihiv, a region bordering Russia north of Kyiv, sentenced a man to a six-year jail term in a banal criminal arson case—nothing like the Russian-directed crimes highlighted above. Six months before, the man had joined an unidentified figure at a KFC restaurant on Odesa’s bustling Derybasivska street. There, he was promised 2,100 dollars to set fire to a cocktail bar in Chernihiv, on the other side of the country. The mysterious figure reportedly told the accused he had “decided not to go to Chernihiv himself because of the threat of being mobilised during a control” by military recruiters. He also demanded a video of the crime before sending payment.

The man went to Chernihiv a few days later and quickly went to work, holding the camera as his two accomplices lobbed three Molotov cocktails into the wrong restaurant. They retreated to Kyiv and tried again four days later, this time successfully torching the cocktail bar serving smoke-infused Bloody Marys and truffle Negronis that was the original target. The unlucky group was later arrested at a police checkpoint outside of Chernihiv.

The man, who already had multiple convictions served in Mariupol before 2022, repented. “He currently wishes to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine and has requested a suspended sentence” the verdict read.

There’s the obvious fact that Ukraine has made it through winter, avoiding a major energy collapse or humanitarian disaster despite months of Russian strikes and freezing temperatures that left hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without heating. That would be enough for temporary relief.

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But it’s not just that. Successful Ukrainian counterattacks in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, the claim that Russian forces are now losing more soldiers than they’re able to recruit, and the overall public-facing dynamism of the new defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov has also led to what Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as “new feeling”: “we feel the Russians’ weakness in some areas” he said during a press conference this week.

Even the first story I wanted to highlight in this issue strikes a positive note:

“Ukrainian Railways have resumed train service to Zaporizhzhia”

As with every other issue linked to the war, the good news is about the temporary absence of hardship: in frontline cities like Kharkiv, Kramatorsk and, for the past couple of weeks, Zaporizhzhia, Russian drone attacks on railway infrastructure have put an end to the train as a reliable, safe and cheap means of transportation. Trains departing from Zaporizhzhia have been regularly canceled in the past month, forcing passengers to take a bus to the city of Dnipro, an hour and a half away.

Since the beginning of February, local outlet “Zaporizhzhia Investigation Center” writes, “only one train, the number 38 to Kyiv, departed from the Zaporizhzhia-1 station, but even then not every day.” But for the past few days, regular traffic has resumed.

It’s a mundane piece, one that reflects a new reality of this war for millions of Ukrainians, as Russian forces look to isolate frontline regions. A new reality where buying a train ticket on the Ukrainian Railways app can now come with a warning to follow the conductor’s instructions in case of a drone attack, while covering “your head and neck with your hands, clothing, a blanket, a pillow, or other available items.”

Good news with caveats then, good news at the mercy of the next wave of Russian drones or missiles, but good news nonetheless. As I mentioned previously, optimism has even reached the military sphere, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the capture of some 400 km2 of territory (a disputed figure among watchers of the conflict) in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions this past month.

This is where the second text that I wanted to include in this issue, published by Ukrainian outlet Texty, comes in:

“How Not to Lose the War of Attrition: 3 Blocks of Problems”

It’s a particularly interesting piece to me because it both highlights and clashes with the current mood.

The report really centers on this year’s main question: what is this war of attrition leading to? It’s a question that also underlines the current moment of (cautious) optimism: the hope is that Russia will keep losing more people than it can recruit, leading to the gradual exhaustion of its troops and, ultimately, of its offensive effort. The frontline would then freeze, making it possible for actual negotiations to begin. At this point, Ukraine would, arguably and at tremendous cost, have won the war of attrition.

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Ukrainian outlet Texty identifies three “blocks of problems” it says Ukraine needs to solve in order for this to happen. There’s forces replenishment, which includes the need for a more effective mobilization and training system, the preservation of units’ experience, and the importance of brigade recovery away from the frontline (“the unit should get real time and space for a break — not a ‘second-line reserve’ where it can be thrown in at any moment to plug a hole, but a real withdrawal from the combat cycle”); organizational adaptability, with the example of the Russian drone unit ‘Rubikon’ and the question of who adapts faster (“the honest answer is complex and unpleasant. In certain narrow areas, particularly drone warfare, Russia has demonstrated the ability to adapt institutionally faster than Ukraine has been able to extend its own innovations to the army level”); and finally, the industrial base (“for Ukraine, a country with a limited industrial base, the key principles are decentralization, flexibility, and maintaining financial support from European partners”).

But as the headline makes it clear, Texty’s piece isn’t really aligned with the current optimism, discussing how to “not lose” rather than how to win. The sentence of the story really drives that point home: “we break down the war of attrition into its key components, and explain why the current course leads to defeat.”

The difference between the piece’s somber tone and the more defiant stance seen in official statements probably isn’t that hard to explain: it is natural to see a gap between, on one hand, a leadership keen to project an image of strength and a civilian population eager for good news and, on the other hand, a Ukrainian military community which has always emphasized a more “realistic” (read: pessimisstic) outlook and more radical solutions. And there’s the natural ebb and flow of gloom and optimism seen in any society engulfed in a never-ending war.

Still, the war continues, and with it, the occupation by Russia of huge parts of Ukraine’s land. The last story I wanted to put forward in this issue is about this:

“How Ukrainians can leave the occupation: current routes and travel conditions”

This piece by the local outlet Nyzhni Sirohozy.City (a small town in the now-occupied part of the Kherson region) is a thorough exploration of how Ukrainian can and do leave the occupied territories, meant both as a journalistic piece and an extremely practical, almost step-by-step guide on how to leave. It provides a glimpse of just how harrowing and stress-inducing these trips can be by listing the various routes available, along with prices, potential dangers and general tips.

One possibility is to travel to Belarus and cross into Ukraine from the humanitarian corridor set up there in the Volyn region, a route the story says is the “cheapest and relatively safest” to get back to Ukraine:

You have to walk from the Belarusian checkpoint “Mokrany” to the Ukrainian checkpoint “Domanove”. To the right and left are forests where land mines have been laid. In the middle is an asphalt road. Elderly people or people with disabilities who decide to go through this border crossing unaccompanied will have a hard time. The path along the neutral strip is a little more than a kilometer. Of course, no one will provide any escort.

If one chooses to go through Crimea, the outlet warns, filtration at the “Chongar” checkpoint will be the most difficult part of the journey, as the Russian FSB can interrogate people for hours and search phones and suitcases looking for any trace of support for Ukraine. “All subsequent filtrations are easier to go through”, according to the piece.

Until maybe a week or two ago, there was still a tug-of-war in many people’s minds between the gloom of the current, harsh circumstances and the nostalgia-infused joy of a ‘real’ sunny winter, not seen for close to a decade. This is now largely gone I think, swept away by strikes that most recently knocked out light, heating and water to Kyiv’s entire left bank and several other parts of the city.

It is the fourth winter of the war, and that matters. Russia first tried to turn off the light across Ukraine back in the fall of 2022. Every winter since, Ukrainians have adapted, prepared themselves and learned how to cope with strikes that everyone now expected.

When the scheduled outages began this fall, there probably wasn’t a Ukrainian in the entire country who didn’t have some sort of contingency plan — maybe just a couple of power banks, a stack of candles and some batteries to power a frontal lamp, maybe a more elaborate set up with one or several Ecoflows, a portable gas stove and one of those fancy light bulbs that work normally when there’s electricity, but switches to an internal battery when power is cut off. Every shop, supermarket and office bought diesel generators that also range tremendously in size and power. Everyone had already been through it, and I think most people felt reasonably confident they would be fine.

I’m somewhat reluctant to frame this as yet another example of heroic Ukrainian resilience. Not because that resilience isn’t there — it is, made of ingenuity, solidarity and incalculable small-scale initiatives. But I’ve grown to fear that this framing has led to an exoticised depiction of Ukrainians as superhumans ready and able to endure anything, laughing and dancing in the face of adversity. The reality is that resilience is, more and more often, born out of necessity rather than defiance.

But it’s also that Ukrainians’ steady adaptation has been racing with the no less steady degradation of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. As Ukrainians learned to cope with power cuts these past years, Russia kept hitting power plants and substations again and again, changing tack, going from bombing the entire country to focusing on a few select regions. Repairs were undertaken, but could never bring the system back to full capacity, and things got steadily worse. Years to adapt and prepare on one side, years to degrade and destroy on the other.

And yeah, things have been different this winter, different and worse. It was a curious thing to notice, in those first weeks of January. It started with scheduled power outages, inconvenient but also very familiar (they’ve been ongoing since the fall, not mentioning the years before) and fairly easy to accommodate: just check the planning and plan your life around it. Those scheduled outages stretched in duration until, one day, the light suddenly turned off in a café I was writing in. The café did have a generator, but weeks of constant use must have worn it down, or maybe it had run out of fuel, I’m not sure. The café emptied, and I ended up leaving too. Later, many shops and cafés started turning off most of their lights, trying to save some energy. Some shops began closing for a few hours.

The scheduled power cuts were then replaced by emergency, unplanned power cuts as Russian strikes intensified. It initially seemed like a temporary thing, and I kept refreshing the bot on my messaging app, hoping it would stop sending me the message “Увага! Наразі за вашою адресою застосовується екстрене відключення. Графіки стабілізаційних відключень не діють.” (“Attention! An emergency power cut is currently in effect at your address. The stabilisation power cut schedules are not in effect.”). Then I stopped checking as the random and near-constant power cuts became the new normal. I really can’t complain — I haven’t had any water or heating cuts, which is more than most people in Kyiv can say, and I don’t have to walk up the stairs to the 15th floor when the elevator isn’t working. My building didn’t freeze, and I’ve been fine sleeping with two additional blankets (central heating wasn’t cut, but it was lowered to the minimum).

Temperatures have been milder these past few days, and it looks like the worst of the winter may be behind Ukraine already, at least in terms of weather. Strikes are going to continue as Russia tries to complete the years-long campaign to collapse Ukraine’s energy system.

Something to read

Ekonomichna Pravda (in Ukrainian) | Where to Winter in Ukraine? | January 15

A telling headline as millions of Ukrainians wrestle with power cuts, with many looking for temporary accommodations in less afflicted regions. Most interesting in the piece is this breakdown of Ukrainian cities most affected by power cuts, as seen through the percentage of time spent without light between January 9 and 15 (things have gotten a lot worse since). The breakdown makes it clear that the Russian campaign is targeting the Ukrainian capital first and foremost:

Boryspil (Kyiv region) — 77%
Brovary (Kyiv region) — 63.7%
Kyiv — 46.2%
Kremenchuk (Poltava region) — 44.5%
Irpin (Kyiv region) — 42.7%
Petropavlivska Borshchahivka (Kyiv region) — 42.3%
Bucha (Kyiv region) — 41%
Vyshneve (Kyiv region) — 39.2%
Sofiivska Borshchahivka (Kyiv region) — 39.8%
Kriukivshchyna (Kyiv region) — 37%
Boiarka (Kyiv region) — 33.7%
Dnipro — 33.6%

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NGL Media (in English & Ukrainian) | Hundreds of thousands, but not millions | January 16

This investigation by Lviv-based media NGL looks into the highly sensitive question of just how many men have left Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion—until this summer, martial law prevented most men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country. The article seems to have been triggered by a piece published in October by the Telegraph claiming that close to 100,000 Ukrainian men had left the country in just two months after Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to lift the ban for men aged 18 to 22. The real number, according to NGL’s estimates, is closer to 78,000.

NGL makes the conservative estimate that 540,000 men have left Ukraine since the invasion began, including at least 70,000 people who fled illegally. It’s a question that is much more difficult to answer than might appear at first glance, with countries often just counting crossings (and many people do leave, but then come back) and many not giving age and gender breakdowns.

The real figure is likely higher, NGL acknowledges—Eurostat says 1.1 million Ukrainian men received temporary protection between 2022 and 2024. But this is nevertheless a solid conservative estimate to build upon.

Carnegie Center | Ukraine’s Regional Shift: Realignments in Wartime and Beyond | December 17

This report does what few pieces of writing have attempted since the beginning of the Russian invasion: paint the early, broad strokes of what a future Ukraine may look like based on the trends already shaping the country. The portrait that is emerging is that of a shrinking country, increasingly centered on its Western regions, and in which the war has “fortified” national identity but weakened the country’s decentralization process.

Western and central regions, such as Ivano-Frankivsk and Cherkasy, are gradually emerging as new investment poles, while the war-affected southeast risks slipping into sustained economic marginalization. Unless actively addressed, this divergence could solidify into a durable postwar imbalance—one that shapes Ukraine’s economic geography for decades. (...) Western Ukraine continues to absorb the majority of IDPs. These regions now face a growing challenge: transitioning from a short-term humanitarian response to long-term integration strategies.

0629 (in Ukrainian & Russian) | Why people from Donetsk dislike those from Mariupol | November 2025

A fascinating history of the rivalry between Donetsk and Mariupol, the two centers of the Donetsk region, from the Russian empire to the 2022 invasion and Russian occupation. Below is a shortened, AI-translated (checked and edited by me) version of the piece:

Before the outbreak of World War I, the status of these two settlements was generally incomparable. Judge for yourself. The county town of Mariupol, with a population of almost 60 thousand, was the second busiest port in the southern Russian Empire, after Odessa. Two large metallurgical plants operated here. The city housed the consular offices of 7 European states: Greece, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain. (...) The young Yuzivka (the future Donetsk), meanwhile, was founded only in 1869 (...) Only in May 1917 did the village receive the status of city. But even then, it did not look very good. The Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who was unlucky enough to work at the local metallurgical plant in 1917, described Yuzivka as follows: “A messy and dirty village surrounded by shacks and dugouts.”

(...) In 1924, Yuzivka was renamed the city of Stalin [Stalino]. It is said that this laid the foundation for the city’s rapid growth, since a city bearing the name of the “father of nations” cannot just remain a backwater.

(...) Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of independent Ukraine, the conflict between Donetsk and Mariupol deepened. Donetsk crime groups tried to take full control of other cities in the region, including Mariupol, and acted primarily through business, bankrupting enterprises and buying them up for practically nothing.

(...) When the period of rampant crime was left behind, a period of economic and administrative pressure from Donetsk on Mariupol began. The city, which contributed up to 4% of Ukraine’s GDP, was a pauper against the backdrop of flourishing Donetsk. In Donetsk, new shopping centers and sports arenas were being built, roads were being repaired, parks were being developed, and new modern housing was being built. At this time, Mariupol had wage arrears, the city’s budget had a huge deficit, and the infrastructure remained Soviet.

(...) Oddly enough, after the (2022) occupation of Mariupol by Russian troops, the long-standing enmity between the two cities took a new turn. “After the Russians took control of the city, I decided to go to Donetsk to at least buy some kerosene - there was nothing in Mariupol except ruins, and I no longer had the strength to cook over fire. I went to my friend in Donetsk, whom I had not seen since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Imagine my surprise when she refused to take me in and refused to help with the shopping. There was so much anger in her words that I was scared. She said that we, Mariupol residents, did nothing to deserve Russia investing so much money in us,” said Nataliya, a Mariupol resident who survived the blockade and remained in occupied Mariupol.

The thing was, after the “liberation” of the completely destroyed city, Russian propaganda began trumpeting that it would turn the port city of Mariupol into a picture of spectacular reconstruction. This propaganda turned out to be quite effective for the residents of Donetsk, which had been occupied nine years earlier.

(...) Thus, an anecdotal story about the “restoration” of one of the central streets of the mining city became illustrative. A year ago, the story goes, workers removed the paving slabs on Donetsk’s Ilyich avenue, where they were laid for the Euro 2012 football championship. Cheap, low-quality asphalt was laid crookedly instead of the slabs. According to Donetsk residents, this high-quality tile from Ukrainian times was taken to Mariupol, where it was used to pave sidewalks and squares, passing off Donetsk tiles as Russian aid. Of course, it is not known whether this tile actually “moved” to the port, and not somewhere in Taganrog or Rostov, but the story is quite telling.

Instead, in Mariupol, stories were told about how, from the completely bombed-out city, they began to transport to Donetsk the surviving unique medical equipment, the remains of municipal transport, etc. These mutual attacks and insults have intensified even more after the region’s water crisis worsened.

ICYMI

Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days

• Financial Times / Russia, Ukraine and the race for Chinese drone components

• The Wall Street Journal / Inside Ukraine’s Quest to Build a Missile to Strike Deep in Russian Territory

• Politico Europe / My survival guide to the Kremlin’s winter of terror in Kyiv

• The New York Times / At the Center of Trump’s Vision for Rebuilding Ukraine: BlackRock

Something to watch

It’s been curious to see World War 2 being used again and again as the default conflict to compare the current Russo-Ukrainian war to, even as World War 1 seems like a much better example for anyone in search of historical analogies.

This engaging lecture focuses on the months that led to the November 1918 armistice, explaining the complex factors that pushed the Germans to take the initiative and ask for an armistice — and the Allies to accept it, despite being on the path to total victory. This obviously isn’t to say that things might shape up in the same way today (they won’t), but there is some food for thought there.

The text obviously had a huge impact on people, as it was shared close to 7,000 times just on Facebook.

It is in my experience a depressingly accurate telling. I took the very unremarkable picture attached to this newsletter from the back of an evacuation armored van as we entered the city of Pokrovske (Dnipropetrovsk region) on October 18. Russian forces were then about 17 kilometers from the city. Gliding bombs had been dropped on bridges leading to the approach of Pokrovske the previous day, but it was quiet that morning — and the rest of the day — and a police officer told me that FPV drones weren’t used in the area just yet. We didn’t stay long in the city itself, but I could see some life, civilian cars, people on bicycles, a few shops working.

The drones arrived in the days and weeks that followed, as Russian forces closed in and strikes intensified. Footage appeared showing that place in the picture on fire after an attack. Russian troops are now nine kilometers away from Pokrovske. The hardened volunteers I entered the city with barely a month ago say it’s now too dangerous to go there.

The text is long, but I’ve only very slightly trimmed it—I think it deserves to be read in full. It was translated using DeepL and then edited by me.

A few days ago, I came across a motivational post on Facebook talking about the need to join the army, because otherwise your city will be looted, women will be raped, your property will be forcibly taken, and you will be sent either to Siberia or to the front line, depending on your luck.

I understand the objective of such a post, and I even support the author’s goal of encouraging people to enlist, but it doesn’t work that way. Everything he wrote is nonsense, and many people are fully aware of this. And if you talk nonsense and then call on everyone to do something, people won’t even want to do it subconsciously, because no one wants to follow the calls of someone who talks nonsense.

So I’ll tell you how it actually works, step by step.

When the frontline starts to approach a city, say the distance to the LBZ [line of combat operations] gets to 50-70 kilometres, military personnel begin to arrive en masse. That’s rear units, brigade depots, which are being moved away from the immediate frontline for security reasons. Housing rents rise sharply, and it becomes almost impossible to find accommodation. The infrastructure begins to struggle to cope: lines appear in shops, you find yourself waiting for hours at [private postal service] Nova Poshta, you can only go to the hairdresser if you have an appointment and need to wait at least a week to get your car checked at the repair shop.

This is a period of economic prosperity, and most of these cities (except for Kharkiv) see more money than they ever have. Hardware stores, auto part stores, repair shops, grocery stores, coffee shops, pizzerias, sushi bars, hairdressers, Nova Poshta branches — they all pop up like mushrooms after the rain. If there’s no large supermarket in the city, prices are rising for everything. If there is a retailer like ATB or Varus, prices remain stable — until the frontline gets within a distance of 35-40 kilometres.

At that point, most of the rear units leave and start being replaced by combat brigades. Big retail stores pull out along with the rear units, and the market becomes entirely local. That’s when everyone starts losing their income.

The military immediately starts establishing their quarters, and since most of them have to settle into dilapidated buildings, there’s a huge cost to renovating and making those at least habitable. Lorries owned by large construction stores start delivering goods several times a week. Bombings begin: mostly in the industrial area and the forest around the city, sometimes in the city itself, but not often enough to scare the locals — because, for them, it’s time to make some dough.

There’s also an influx of money going into the local budget, which local authorities rush to spend: new road markings, new flower beds, new lighting, restoration of destroyed buildings, new windows in schools and kindergartens that no one attends... there’s no limit to their imagination.

The frontline grinds forward by another 10 kilometres and things change a bit — more strikes, focusing increasingly on civilian rather than military targets. New Post offices, construction stores, car repair shops (I’m not sure why they like them so much, but as far as I remember, five such shops have already been destroyed by gliding bombs). People gradually begin to leave. But the most desperate remain, and prices rise even more. I’ve seen them charge 120 hryvnias for a jar of olivier salad in a shop, 200 for a pack of cigarettes and 100 for two litres of vodka (just enough to get wasted quickly).

15-20 kilometres. Strikes become more frequent. There’s no one to repair the lights anymore, mobile communication is sputtering out, FPV drones are becoming more and more common on the streets. A few damaged shops are still operating but most of them have closed, and there’s already burnt-out cars in the parking lot that nobody bothers to clean up. Almost all the residents are gone, leaving behind a few hundred pensioners, a few hundred beggars, and a few hundred people who aren’t so right in the head and believe they have nowhere else to go. Even the shop workers are gone: their bosses bring them in in the morning, and take them to relative safety in the evening.

You see a lot less soldiers in the streets, because most of them have moved their bases around ten kilometres from the city. They stop at the shops on the way in and out, and then take off. The shops themselves, these islands of civilisation, gradually close down, or get hit.

5-10 kilometres. The bastards start demolishing the city with gliding bombs, artillery, multiple rocket launcher systems and missiles. Many of the locals still present finally realise that it doesn’t matter where they go, the only important thing is to leave. Some are taken away by volunteers, others by the police, others yet get out by themselves. Some cannot leave because they are buried in the remains of their homes.

Then enemy groups begin to infiltrate the city and to look for shelters -- and now it is our turn to destroy every possible shelter, the houses and the cellars and the basements. Sometimes the frontline inside the city shifts several times in one direction and then another, adding to the destruction.

After the armed forces of Ukraine leave the city, the enemy tries to create a logistical centre within its ruins to regroup, accumulate troops and resources for the next assaults, and then we demolish the city with gliding bombs, artillery, multiple rocket launcher systems and missiles.

After a few months, maybe around six months, the city becomes a relatively safe area where you can walk around. That’s the time for looting and raping and stealing but it’s impossible because there is noone and nothing left to take. The city disappears, there are no habitable houses, no infrastructure, no roads, no electricity, no water of gas supply. The only thing you can do in those city is to collect scrap metal, a dangerous business because the scrap can suddenly explode right in your hands.

To prevent this from happening, you need to join the Ukrainian military, or to donate as much money as possible if you cannot enlist. Because if those faggots reach your city, you’ll be able to make money off the military, but then you’ll be left without a home, without a business, without property, because all of this will burn down, as it has burned down many times before. The lack of people is one of the main reason the enemy is able to advance, because we fight much better, but they overwhelm us with their numbers.

Something to read

Opendatabot (in Ukrainian) | Analytics | October 2025

Opendatabot is a company linking other companies to various Ukrainian official registries and open data platforms, the majority of which are open source but not always easily accessible. They also have a dedicated analytics page with interesting snapshots of Ukrainian life as seen through these data portals. For example:

• As of October, the average monthly pension in Ukraine amounted to 6,400 hryvnias—around 130 euros or 150 dollars (but nearly a third of pensioners get just half of that). There are currently around 10 million people registered as pensioners in Ukraine.

• More than 45,000 fines for violation of military registration rules have been handed since the beginning of the year. The fines are—unsurprisingly— issued almost exclusively to men (only 98 women have been fined) who didn’t properly register at the military recruitment offices, often (but not always, thanks to the woes of bureaucracy) in a bid to avoid mobilization. It may seem strange, but circumventing mobilization rules can be solved simply by paying a 17,000 hryvnias (around 350 euros) fine. Whether real or the result of a bureaucratic mishap, the violation of military registration rules has very tangible and immediate consequences: it immediately shows as a red, “Wanted” mark showing up on the “Rezerv+” military app, which all mobilization-age men are required to show to law enforcement if asked. It also prevents you from getting any jobs, which explains why a lot of men circumventing mobilization rules are working off the books.

• Ukraine’s general prosecutor has since the beginning of the year recorded 168 cases of “raiding”—the post-Soviet term used to describe forceful takeover of companies, often by forging company registration data. That’s really not much in a country that’s long been plagued by this issue, and it is a lot less than the 572 cases recorded in 2021 (the lowest figure was unsurprisingly registered in 2022, when 109 cases were recorded, none of which made it to court).

Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian & Russian) | Zelensky vs Trukhanov: How Odesa Learns to Live Without a Mayor, and Trukhanov Without a Passport | October 20

There’s a lot to like in this story about the latest scandal surrounding the now-former Odesa mayor, Hennadiy Trukhanov. The local baron was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship and forced out of his mayoral seat by Volodymyr Zelensky in mid-October, allegedly after it was discovered that Trukhanov held a Russian passport (Russian investigative outlet The Insider quickly pointed out that the passport was almost certainly fake, though Trukhanov did hold one in the past). The depiction of the journalists’ awkward, choreographed stroll through Odesa with Trukhanov is pretty great, as is the thorough recap of the scandal—and the uncomfortable way it’s been received across Ukraine, including among people with no love lost for Trukhanov.

A few things worth noting from this piece:

• Ukrainska Pravada (UP) points out that this sort of “direct action” (as the outlet calls it) isn’t new for Zelensky, who has used it previously against figures such as pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk in 2021, Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Korban the following year (both men were stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship) or by enacting personal sanctions against former president Petro Poroshenko.

• As for the key question of “why now” (reports about Trukhanov’s Russian citizenship have been surfacing for more than ten years after all), UP sees it as part of a pre-invasion plan to remove deeply entrenched local elites, a plan that the president’s office had failed to kickstart in the 2020 local elections (which, on the contrary, had highlighted the strength of these local elites after the turbulent 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections). But, especially after the invasion, it’s become possible to frame such moves as a national security issue.

• Another theory is linked to Trukhanov’s alleged close links to Ukrainian military intelligence and its popular head, Kirill Budanov. The presidency’s desire to curtail Budanov’s influence would therefore involve removing Trukhanov.

There’s something very “pre-2022” about the controversy surrounding Trukhanov, a political scandal involving characters with nefarious reputations, complex motivations and a bending of the rule of law that was particularly commonplace before the Russian invasion. And that is in itself noteworthy, as yet another marker not only that politics are creeping back even as the war keeps going unabated, but also that the way that politics is being done is unlikely to significantly change.

ICYMI

Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days

• The New York Times / Trump’s Russia Sanctions Shift War Dynamics to the Energy Front

• The Wall Street Journal / As Putin Digs In, a Long—and Different—War With Ukraine Looms

• The Guardian / Ukrainian attack spoiled planned Zaporizhzhia birthday gift for Putin

• Bloomberg / Putin Calls Up Reserves to Protect Russia From Ukraine’s Drones

• NPR / A youth orchestra in Ukraine creates an overture with the sounds of war

KYIV—Around a year ago, I laid out in this newsletter my impressions about Ukraine’s current situation and where this war might be headed. It then looked like we were approaching a pivotal moment, from the worsening military situation to the election of Donald Trump and the gloomy prospect of renewed Russian strikes on energy infrastructures.

I thought it would be a valuable exercise to revisit this text and see how those impressions and thoughts have held up. So here we go, a look back from November 2024:

Back in September, I again wondered how long this war could possibly last. It is foolish to try and predict the ebb and flow of such a massive military conflict, but so it is to ignore the deeper trends, all of which seemed to go against Ukraine [...] Ukrainian forces were being pressed along the entire frontline, not collapsing but not showing any signs of stabilization either. [...] Then there was the prospect of Russia finally and fully destroying Ukraine’s energy system, or the multitude of signals showing the West’s commitment wavering. The only thing going for Ukraine was the scale of Russian losses, both in people and in armored vehicles, which made it likely that fighting would slow down in 2025.

It would be easy to argue that things haven’t actually changed that much, with two exceptions. First, the “prospect of Russia finally and fully destroying Ukraine’s energy system” did not materialize last year but is back in full force now. Winter is still officially more than a month away, yet I and millions of Ukrainians already have experienced several hours-long power cuts—early confirmation of the general feeling that this will be the hardest winter of the war.

Second, Ukraine has begun conducting an enduring and remarkably effective long-range strike campaign on Russia’s refineries, giving the Ukrainian leadership a renewed theory of victory, or at least the hope that this could be a path to a ceasefire.

When it comes to the frontline, “not collapsing but not showing any signs of stabilization either” still seems to perfectly describe the situation of the Ukrainian forces. And yet… my view is that the situation has in fact gotten markedly worse, but the deterioration has been slow and gradual enough to make it possible—easy, even—to ignore. Russian forces may have reached the outskirts of Lyman, but that involved a 10-kilometer advance that took an entire year and an untold number of casualties. Even the more significant advances—Pokrovske going from standing 80 kilometers away from the eastern frontline to just 20 kilometers now, or Russian forces having advanced some 40 kilometers beyond Vuhledar in the past year—can be dismissed by zooming out to show the entire country of Ukraine.

Yet these slow, grinding assaults have now all coalesced into a situation where Russian forces have entered or reached the outskirts of at least 5 crucial urban strongholds: Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad, Kostiantynivka, Lyman, Siversk and Kupyansk. As a fairly risk-averse journalist, there’s an unsettling sense that Donbas has shrunk to almost nothing—to just Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, with even the short but open road linking the two now dangerous as Russian drones strike deeper and more often.

Compared to 2024, I feel like there is a growing gap between the situation on the ground and the way it is being discussed. I’ve already mentioned it in this newsletter earlier this year, but I do think it’s only gotten more stark since. It’s particularly jarring in Ukrainian media, where grounded and realistic assessments are published alongside op-eds loudly announcing the liberation or an individual village or predicting an imminent collapse of the Russian economy. In Western countries, there’s been the popular trope regarding the years or decades it would supposedly take for Russian troops to seize a given part of Ukraine at the current pace, a vivid illustration of the slowness of Russian advances that also completely misrepresents the nature of this war (I can’t help but wonder if similar calculations were made in some French or British broadsheet in March 1917). There’s also been a puzzling tendency to declare the Russian summer offensive not only over but failed—even as Russian troops still push forward, and Pokrovsk stands on the brink.

The reality remains that Russian gains only matter insofar as they tell us something about the respective strength of both armies. To take a bit of an extreme example, a 30-kilometer Russian push wouldn’t necessarily be bad news if this were the consequence of a planned, controlled Ukrainian retreat. But the opposite is also true, slow advances shouldn’t automatically be seen as proof that Russia is losing.

This is where the uncertainty lies. I do believe that Ukrainian forces are being slowly worn down and struggling more, not less, with each passing month. But it is also the case that Russian troops remain unable to make a meaningful breakthrough, both because of the state of their own military and because of Ukraine’s drone-centric defense. This then does look like a quasi-stalemate.

So, will I stand here in one year and write again about gradual Russian advances, about Ukrainian forces bending but not breaking? I find it hard to believe, but maybe—the question of how long this quasi-stalemate can hold and what a break could look like is, frankly, above my pay grade.

What I find particularly worrying is the continuous consensus in Western commentariat that, if this shaky equilibrium was to finally collapse, it could only be in one direction—with Russian forces finally exhausting their offensive potential, or some sort of economic troubles pushing Moscow to agree to a pause. But there are a lot of people in Ukraine who can’t afford the luxury of wishful thinking and worry about this current ‘stable instability’ collapsing in the other direction: with faster and faster Russian advances as Ukrainian manpower woes, the methodical destruction of Ukrainian logistics and targeting of drone pilots leads to more and more critical situations all along the front and sees Ukrainian defenses crumble.

Back to 2024:

But now, Donald Trump has been elected. On paper, nothing has changed. Ukraine’s military predicament is still as dire, the question of where the country will stand by winter’s end still as tense. And yet, while nobody can say what Trump’s election will mean for Ukraine, there is in the country an unmistakable and widely shared feeling that a new chapter has opened, that the current trajectory of the war is going to be interrupted, for better or for worse.

The “widely shared feeling” was wrong. The trajectory of the war has essentially remained the same: a steady but manageable degradation of the situation without any clear prospects for peace.

That’s not to say that Trump’s arrival in the White House didn’t lead to a lot of noise—there’s been a dizzying flurry of initiatives and diplomatic overtures and talks and statements and hopes and disappointments. But, when the dust settles on 2025, it doesn’t look like this will have led to any meaningful changes when it comes to Vladimir Putin’s willingness to settle. To me, there’s the question of wheter Trump’s wildly unpredictable decisions can even really be described as “about-faces” or “pendulum swings”: you could just as well see them as zigzags in what has been a fairly consistent policy once he realized there would be no quick peace: seeing Ukraine first and foremost as an annoying problem he wishes could just go away; and pulling back without outright abandoning Ukraine by putting the burden on Europe.

But Trump’s unpredictability has also fed this growing perception gap between the situation on the ground and the way it is portrayed. Earlier this month, Ukrainian historian and intellectual Yaroslav Hrytsak warned against the “illusion” of thinking that Trump would decisively turn away from Russia to support Ukraine (this was before Trump slapped sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, itself the source of a new wave of hope about Trump confronting Russia). The use of the word ‘illusion’ struck me, coming just two months after Ukrainian military analyst Mykola Bielieskov had this to say: “July 2025 will be remembered as a time of great illusion, when it began to seem that Donald Trump had made a radical 180-degree turn in terms of the formula for resolving the war between Ukraine and Russia.” In Ukraine, that exhausting back and forth of hopes and disillusionment will likely come to define 2025.

From 2024:

But I honestly can’t see how these negotiations could, in the short term, lead even to a simple ceasefire—the idea of NATO troops guarding a demilitarized zone seems like an obvious non-starter for Moscow, as are strong security guarantees for Ukraine. The Kremlin will want a small Ukrainian military and no Western support, which is unacceptable for Kyiv (and even if it was acceptable, how would Moscow enforce it?) unless it has no choice—unless it has capitulated [...] In any case, it is still too early to discuss talks that may not happen at all, may flounder immediately, may officially start but go at a snail’s pace as the Kremlin tries to buy time. The war is, probably, going to continue.

This, I think remains true… or does it?

BBC Ukraine ran this interesting piece a few days ago, looking at a series of statements by Ukrainian politicians predicting an end of the war soon—as soon as this year, in some cases. These statements aren’t new (Zelenskyy himself has repeatedly said similar things in the past two years) and they’ve always been wrong so far, so there really isn’t any reason to take this seriously.

But there’s something else, rooted in the slowness and the cost of Russian military advances and, much more importantly, the long-range strikes that Ukraine has inflicted on Russian refineries (with remarkable regularity) for several months now. The feeling of a ‘turning point’ that may see Russia ready to at least pause the fighting in the near future. Here’s’ how the view was expressed recently by Anatoly Amelin, co-founder of the ‘Institute for the Future’ Ukrainian think tank: “If Ukraine increases the pace to 4-5 successful strikes per week, 50-60% of Russia’s processing capacity could be taken out by February 2026. This would create a critical fuel situation for the Russian army and economy. In the spring of 2026, the cumulative effect could force Moscow to negotiate.”

Without committing to what looks like a fantastically optimistic timeline, American military analyst Rob Lee (arguably one of the best analysts of the war since 2022) has also cautiously expressed the view that “Russia is approaching an inflection point in the coming months about whether to continue the war”. The argument here is that Russia may be unable to achieve meaningful territorial advances and destroy the Ukrainian army without changing “its current approach”. This would involve measures, like a new wave of mobilization or the shouldering of additional economic pain, that could undermine the regime’s credibility and, therefore, stability. Though Rob Lee points out that the consequence could be more aggressive moves on Russia’s part, rather than a desire to come to the negotiating table.

The former Ukrainian journalist and current soldier Pavlo Kazarin, who has consistently written some of the most sharpest takes on this war, recently recapped his view of the conflict this way: “our country lives in anticipation that Russia will run out of money. Moscow lives in anticipation that we’ll run out of soldiers. The side who is right about his forecast will win the war.”

There is, therefore, the sense that 2026 may see this change of trajectory that some thought would already come with Donald Trump’s presidency. But even the optimistic scenario—one in which economic troubles pushes Russia to agree to some sort of ceasefire or pause—will still leave both sides just as far apart when it comes to negotiating terms as they’ve been this year.

I’m genuinely not sure what I think (and that makes me thankful to be a journalist, prediction isn’t part of my responsibilities). I don’t believe we’ve seen any indications that Vladimir Putin has changed his mind about defeating Ukraine on the battlefield, and I think there are, on the contrary, multiple indications that the Russian president still thinks he can achieve that. Crucially, I also don’t think this belief is outlandish or delusional. But it is, maybe, possible that this will change in the coming months, if the Russian military proves unable to break Ukrainian forces, if the Ukrainian long-range campaign remains just as effective, and if the US and Europe maintain their support. Maybe.

Le Monde wrote an English-language tribute to Antoni Lallican that you can read here. Reporters Without Borders published their first findings about the attack here.

Georgiy Ivanchenko is now facing a gruelling period of hospitalisation, recovery and rehabilitation. His friends have started a crowdfunding campaign to support him, in which you can participate from abroad using PayPal, at this address: ukrainianphotographers@gmail.com

KYIV—On October 12, dozens of Ukrainian outlets ran a story with the same headline: “Сили оборони звільнили село Малі Щербаки на Запоріжжі” — “Defense forces have liberated the village of Maly Sherbaky in the Zaporizhzhya region”. The articles were all based on a Telegram post published by the 24th assault battalion ‘Aidar’ claiming Ukrainian forces had advanced into the village following an offensive conducted with the 33rd assault regiment. Along with the message was a video showing soldiers in ghillie suits posing with their units’ flags in front of a destroyed brick house. The Telegram post doesn’t actually use the word “liberated”, going instead with a more prosaic assessment: “the settlement is under the control of the Ukrainian defence forces.”

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The Ukrainian war monitoring project DeepState updated its map on October 13, but didn’t declare Maly Sherbaky ‘liberated’: the village went from partially Russian-controlled to squarely into the grey zone. Movement has been quite limited in this part of the frontline: one year ago exactly, DeepState had Maly Sherbaky marked as under Ukrainian control but a mere two kilometers from the frontline. It was in the exact same position one year before that, in 2023. And yet again the same in October 2022.

It’s hard to overstate just how insignificant Maly Sherbaky was, even before the war. It then had just 355 inhabitants, according to official data. A rectangle 1 kilometer long and 1,5 kilometers wide at the intersection of two roads. Five streets in total, one farm at its southern edge, another at the north-western corner. The insignificance is even in the name: “Maly Sherbaky” translates to “small Sherbaky”, little brother to the nearby village of Sherbaky.

The headlines about the events around Maly Sherbaky made me think about liberation and when, exactly, the term starts losing its meaning. Since I’ve started covering this war, I feel like I’ve only witnessed once what anyone would—probably based on watching World War 2 movies—instinctively think of as a “liberation”, when I entered Kherson a few days after it was taken back by Ukrainian forces in 2022: smiling kids lining up the streets and waving flags, locals spontaneously gathering on the central square, embracing soldiers and queuing up to take selfies with them, everywhere a genuine, overwhelming relief and euphoria.

There was really nothing like that a few weeks before, when I arrived in Izyum and then Kupyansk, recently liberated following the stunning September ‘22 Ukrainian offensive. The relief was there, but so often overshadowed by exhaustion and trauma—people were gathering up under the rain near a ravaged building to recharge their phones at the only available generators, while an old man was talking about the bodies lying in the streets until just a few days ago. Kupyansk was different still, as the Russian forces were still close, just on the other side of the river: artillery was firing on both sides, and panicked locals (who had been living under occupation but away from the frontline since the beginning of the war) looked for ways to flee. Still, there was relief and even sometimes joy, insofar as there were people to express relief and joy.

I know nothing about Maly Sherbaky. But the fact it’s been an unbelievable three years right on the frontline—albeit in one of the quieter areas of the front—makes it easy to think that Maly Sherbaky almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore, not in any real sense of the term. That almost all of the 300 or so people who lived there have long fled or been killed. Maly Sherbaky wasn’t liberated because it is still a war zone, while liberation implies peace, even if temporary and fleeting. But, more importantly, because there is nothing and no one to liberate there anymore.

Something to read

The Village Ukraine (in Ukrainian) | ‘Sir, I’m fucking exhausted’: How soldiers go on leave | September 23

Two soldiers talk about the uncertain and all-too-rare break in the military: how it is requested, how it is often rejected, why it is so rare, how it feels when it finally happens. It’s a look at the war through the lens of those precious few days of rest that soldiers constantly think about.

It’s not possible to release more than 30% of personnel at once. And since we lacked people who could perform the tasks, they released us one by one. So the next person in line had to wait until the previous one returned. Because of this, the second half of the leave (another 15 days [soldiers are in theory guaranteed 30 days of leave a year]) almost never came around. This was the case in the first unit, in the second, and in the current one—the brigades are different, but the problem is the same everywhere.

[...]

Combat units constantly suffer casualties and may remain in their positions almost continuously due to a lack of personnel to replace them. There are different front lines. There is the so-called ‘zero’ line—places where combat operations are directly conducted. People practically never leave this area. For example, for four people to leave a dugout, four more must immediately take their place. If someone is wounded and drops out of the schedule, the others are forced to hold their positions longer while he is away. In such cases, rotations become less frequent. The situation is similar on the front line, but it is a little easier to get out. Starting from the second line, it is much easier to rotate, because that is where most of the personnel are located.

Hromadske (in Ukrainian) | ‘I’m starving’: Why are the salaries of soldiers causing outrage, and will they be raised? | October 2

Soldiers’ pay has been a near-constant issue in this war, and one that came at the forefront in recent weeks as the parliament began discussing the 2026 state budget.

This piece by Hromadeske does a good job of laying out the issue by focusing on the soldiers serving in the rear. For frontline troops, the problem has sometimes been a very different one, with some volunteers raising the alarm about soldiers spending all of their salary and combat duty bonuses in online gambling.

But here, the issue is about the much bigger number of soldiers serving in the rear for a salary of some 20,000 hryvnias (around $480), a sum very often significantly lower than what they earned before they joined or were mobilized and, crucially, one that doesn’t keep up with the rising prices of rent in most of the major cities.

(As a sidenote, rent prices are also a very real issue closer to the frontline: soldiers live not in bases that could be targeted at any point but in flats or village dachas scattered across the frontline regions, and the high demand means prices have skyrocketed)

The issue becomes of course even more acute when it comes to skilled jobs, as the pay cut that a typical IT worker would take when going to the military becomes a motivation to avoid military service.

Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian) | AWOL: How the back-to-service mechanism works, and what’s wrong with it | October 14

A long investigation into the issue of desertion in the Ukrainian military. The eye-catching figure is that 200,473 of the 289,600 cases opened by the Ukrainian general prosecutor for AWOL and desertion since the beginning of the invasion were opened in the previous 12 months.

But I think more important is this sentence: “AWOL and desertion have become one of the only ways for soldiers to transfer between units”.

This puts the staggering number mentioned above in a different perspective: desertion has effectively become necessary to the workings of the Ukrainian military, as a way to cope with or compensate for dysfunctions within the army. As Ukrainska Pravda points out, it’s been used as the de facto best way to switch between brigades, particularly when the parliament voted last year a law waiving criminal liability for desertion if the soldier came back to the army—various units then began running ads specifically dedicated to attracting soldiers who had deserted within their brigades.

But it’s also become a pressure valve to compensate for the lack of terms of service or prospects of demobilization: exhausted soldiers reaching their breaking point or faced with incompetent commanders always have this option of simply leaving. It of course remains illegal, and soldiers have faced jail sentences for desertion. But, importantly, I think desertion is largely socially accepted in the Ukraine of 2025: very few people are going to dare to judge a soldier who decided to flee after fighting two or three years on the frontline.

ICYMI

Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days

• Financial Times / Military briefing: Ukraine races to intercept Russian drones

• The Washington Post / Her grandma saved her from the Russians, then chose to say goodbye

• The New York Times / Ukraine’s Formula for Peace: Fewer Talks, More Weapons

• The Wall Street Journal / Russian Drones Turn the Streets of Kherson Into a Civilian Kill Zone

• The Globe and Mail / A front beyond the front

It’s only a few months later, when I was driving around Pokrovsk with my fixer, looking for a place to get petrol (a pretty severe shortage had hit the country at that point), that a chat with soldiers led to one of them pulling out his smartphone and showing us the frontline on the DeepState app.

DeepState and a host of other mapping projects have in the past three years become indispensable, used every day by those watching the war or even taking part in it. They were never perfect tools, but they were—and still are—better than anything a non-military observer could get in any previous peer-to-peer conflict. The massive amount of footage released has allowed teams of volunteers to painstakingly map the exact contours of the fighting, day after day and month after month. For more on DeepState, check out this great story the New York Times did last month on the organization.

But, at a frightening speed, the war has changed. In the past few months, manpower shortages and the mass use of drones not just on the frontline (as was already common since 2022) but in the 10-15 kilometers beyond it has made the war a matter of positions rather than lines. On the maps, the grey squeezed between the blue and red territories has swelled to represent areas not truly controlled by any side, where isolated Ukrainian dugouts can be bypassed by small Russian assault teams until they’re detected and hit by drones. Near the Donestk region town of Dobropillya, where Russian forces managed a 10 kilometers-advance last month, what looks like a strictly-enforced operational silence on both sides has only increased the confusion.

The frontline is becoming more and more blurry as Russian forces advance towards the ruins of villages and towns that Ukrainian troops had fought to free back in September 2022 or, as in the case of the Dnipropetrovsk region, progress in regions that had until now been spared from the fighting. It is tempting to extend that bluriness to the situation as a whole, with only three months left in the fourth year of the war. I almost wrote about an increasing uncertainty, but it isn’t really increasing—it is more of a gripping, permanent uncertainty constantly fed by new developments. Maybe blurry is actually a better way to describe it.

Stories to read

NV (in Ukrainian) | “The war is coming to an end”: Venislavsky about negotiations, criminal liability for deserters and lowering of the mobilization age | Sept 16

A surprisingly tough interview of Fedir Venislavskyi, a Ukrainian MP from the presidential party and member of the parliamentary committee on defense and intelligence matters. Venislavskyi has been involved in several bills linked to some of the more difficult political and military issues of the moment: a bill reintroducing criminal liability for deserters (or, rather, removing a 2024 provision that waived this liability if the soldier returned to the military); an effort to recruit more men aged between 18 and 24 (who cannot be forcibly mobilized); and a recent decision to allow men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country.

The discussion, I think, really highlights the lack of a coherent strategy when it comes to the manpower issue in the military.

It’s a long interview, so let’s briefly look at the three points raised in the headline:

• “The war is coming to an end”. Venislavskyi… doesn’t really explain this, despite arguing that it is “obvious”. He seems to be betting it all on a Trump-Zelenskyy-Putin meeting that has never looked more unlikely.

• The bill on criminal liability for desertion is really the trigger for the interview: voted in its first reading in early September (it will likely undergo significant changes before the second reading), it should, among other provisions, reintroduce the standard criminal liability for going AWOL and desertion. Venislavskyi barely admits the law waiving this liability of the soldier returned to the military doesn’t work anymore—but sidesteps the question of whether this will lead to the arrest of tens of thousands of men.

• Then there’s what the journalist describes as an apparent contradiction between creating specific contracts to attract young men into the military, while also allowing men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country. Venislavskyi’s answer to the journalist’s question about the pertinence of letting young men that may be needed in the army leave is, I think, noteworthy: “here it is necessary to understand that there is a strong position amongst all political forces that lowering the mobilization age below 25 years is currently very unlikely. It is unrealistic to think this will happen in the near future, unless there are some generally catastrophic changes.”

Ukrainska Pravda—Zhyttya (in Ukrainian) | The tip of the iceberg. How many abortions did Ukrainian women have during the Great War and what do these statistics show? | September 12

The 2022 Russian invasion didn’t just impact Ukraine’s population—which plummeted as millions of Ukrainians fled abroad—or its birthrate. The country’s health ministry recorded around 43,000 abortions performed in 2024, a sharp drop from the 55,000 abortions recorded in 2021, before the beginning of the invasion.

Do these statistics tell us anything beyond a drop obviously caused by the population decline? It's hard to say, though the article makes a few notes: a slight increase in the share of women older than 35 undergoing abortions (from 28% in 2021 to 32% in 2024), an equally slight increase of abortions in rural areas (from 32% to 35%). In pure percentage terms, there's also been a huge increase in illegal (i.e, not performed by a licensed doctor) abortions, but the raw numbers are still tiny: just one in 2021, 9 in 2023 and 14 last year. Though we don't have the actual statistics, a gynecologist quoted in the article also mentions a strong and sadly unsurprising increase in miscarriages.

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Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian) | The place where every drone is hunting you: how Kherson lives under constant Russian attack | September 17

In a war that has affected so many different people in so many different ways, the plight of Kherson is horrifically unique. Kherson is in this singular position of being the closest Ukrainian major city to the frontline (with the closest Russian positions sitting right on the other bank of the river, a handful of kilometers away) while also not being a battlefield, with the river protecting the city from invasion. Rather than a battlefield, Kherson has become a training and hunting ground for Russian forces.

Ukrainska Pravda’s story is a terrifying look at what it means to live in Kherson today.

First, on the sense of isolation that residents now feel:

“When we have four dead and ten wounded, it’s statistics. And when this happens in other regions, they declare mourning. That’s why we have two realities ,” one of the UP interlocutors says. He complains about the feeling of being under siege, not only physically, but also informationally. It seems to him that the people of Kherson are left alone with their pain.

The strained logistics of Kherson:

Logistics have become a daily ordeal: suppliers used to bring goods, but now Vlasov has to travel to Mykolaiv himself with half a ton of cargo. Any shelling of the area means that there will be no customers in the nearest bakery for the day. If a shelling triggers an emergency power cut, the ovens stop, and the day is lost again. But despite everything, Vlasov continues to keep his bakeries open even in the “red zone.” If there was no one to work, he would close them. But people take turns even under fire—one of his bakeries was hit three times.

The driving:

If you drive a car, without music, with the windows open to hear the UAVs. You often drive at speeds under a hundred. Some of the townspeople have installed a drone detector in their cars: it can signal about FPV nearby, and sometimes even show a picture captured from a drone. The scariest thing is to see your own car on it.

(The last time I was in Kherson, four months ago, I witnessed a car crash in the center that was indirectly caused by the drones: cars driving fast to avoid drones, and traffic lights turned off at intersections because it’s too dangerous to sit idle at a red light.)

I did initially plan to open this issue with a look at the broader situation, six months into 2025. It ended up being a bit too disjointed, awkwardly mixing my bewilderment at the apparent gap between several worrying trends (Washington gradually stepping back, Russia increasing its drone and missiles production, Russian advances on the frontline, Europe’s recent display of powerlessness) and claims that Moscow “has started losing the war in Ukraine” (and other pieces with similar framing); my conjectures about some recent vociferous statements by Russian officials, what makes them so confident and how Moscow likely believes it can win the war; and some thoughts on Ukraine’s failed mobilization strategy and the puzzling lack of discussion around it.

It was a bit messy and I ended up scraping it. What I was hoping to express is easy enough to put in a couple of sentences anyway: it is the disquieting sense that the war is entering a new phase, and that the coming summer and fall will prove both incredibly difficult and consequential for Ukraine.

Stories to read

RUSI | Ukraine Prepares for a Russian Summer Offensive | May 20

If Ukraine can deny Russia from reaching the borders of Donetsk between now and Christmas, and Kyiv’s international partners are diligent in degrading Russia’s economy, Moscow will face hard choices about the costs it is prepared to incur for continuing the war. Under such conditions the Russians may move from Potemkin negotiations to actually negotiating.

There is a darker possible future, in which the summer offensive overpowers Ukrainian defences to take key towns in Donbas, after which Russia pivots to attacking Kharkiv in the autumn, while once again switching its deep strike campaign to degrade Ukrainian power generation and distribution ahead of the winter. Under such circumstances, the Russians hope that they can steadily convince Europe to pressure Ukraine to sue for peace, even on unacceptable terms.

Lb.ua (in Ukrainian) | Artillery in the age of drones | May 2

Drones may have initially become prominent because of a shortage of artillery tubes and shells, but it’s clear the weapon is now crucial in its own right—not just a simple weapon anymore, but a system around which the entire Ukrainian defensive effort is organized. Yet artillery still matters, military analyst Kyrylo Danilchenko argues in this piece. There’s the well-known issue of weather, drones being a lot more affected by rain, wind and snow than artillery. But just as important is protection, and the fact that heavy mortar and even bigger artillery pieces can be hidden in fortified dugouts that are effectively immune to drone attacks, quickly deployed, fired, and hidden again.

Hromadske (in Ukrainian) | “People are treated like cattle”: What happens after Russian shelling, once journalists and authorities have left | April 29

The headline quote and mention of journalists is really what first grabbed my attention about this piece on the devastating April 24 missile strike on Kyiv, when a Russian missile hit a residential building in the Svyatoshin district and killed 13 people. I thought the story would take a critical look at the way media cover these events, the macabre routine that invariably follows the first reports of a strike and the question of the line between information and ghoulishness. Having done this kind of reporting many times (including on the day of that strike), it is something I think about a lot.

That’s not in fact what the piece is about. Hromadske’s journalist focused on the consequences of the strike in the days after, rather than on the immediate, gut-wrenching reaction in the immediate hours that follows it. These are moments when the shock and the pain is already mixing with very practical concerns, when locals who had their flats damaged to various degrees—from a couple of windows blown to entire rooms devastated—start wondering where they will live or how they will receive any sort of compensation.

Olena's apartment was damaged, but it is livable. The windows and doors are broken. However, the woman was initially told that there would be no compensation because her housing was not privatized and was the communal property of the Antonov plant, which distributed apartments to employees.

[...]

Oleksiy is now living with his friends: “They didn’t offer me housing. A 70-year-old woman from Severskodonetsk was also renting a room from me. She is not being compensated. She was left with nothing. They say they can only compensate the owners. Someone I don’t know took her in . ”

BBC Ukraine (in Ukrainian) | “Ukrainians who cooperate with Russia.” Stories of civilians who were given to Russia in the exchange | May 24

The three-day-long, ‘1,000 for 1,000’ prisoner exchange completed on May 25 has been unprecedented for several reasons, one of which being the inclusion of Ukrainian civilians convicted on charges of collaboration. It had happened before on a case-by-case basis, but never on such a scale—at least 70 Ukrainian civilians were exchanged for as many Ukrainians held by Russia.

This has also put the spotlight on a project launched last year by Ukrainian authorities to publicize cases of Ukrainians sentenced for collaboration and asking to be sent to Russia. One of several databases looking to compile lists of convicted or alleged traitors (from the infamous “Myrotvorets” to the “traitor’s registry” of Ukrainian NGO Chesno), “I want to be with my own people” (the name of the project) claims on its website it is also aimed to “help Ukrainian citizens who do not wish to live in Ukraine but express a desire to live in Russia to satisfy their desire”. But the main objective seems to be the public display of people convicted on charges of collaboration.

Immediately before last week’s exchange, only one person out of 300 people listed on the website had been exchanged to Russia. This number has now been significantly bumped up: 31 of the 70 Ukrainian civilians exchanged this week were listed on the website. Most of them had been convicted for working with Russian intelligence and providing information about the Ukrainian military. But at least two were also sentenced to lengthy prison sentences for publishing pro-Russian content on social media—a reminder of the criticism that the vague and broadly applied legislation on collaboration has faced from Ukrainian human rights organizations.

ICYMI

• Reuters / Exclusive: Putin, for Ukraine peace, wants a pledge to halt NATO enlargement, sources say

• The Economist / Russia is raining hellfire on Ukraine

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There is usually reluctance to address these issues head-on, which made me all the more intrigued by the headline of this op-ed: “Nation of victors, nation of occupiers, or what is wrong with our narratives about World War 2”.

The op-ed was published both on the author's Facebook page (where it sparked a lively discussion, gathering more than 90 comments) and on Istorichna Pravda, the History-focused page of Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda. I'm mentioning this because Istorichna Pravda isn't some fringe publication looking to push alternative viewpoints. It generally upholds a fairly mainstream view of the current historical and memory discussion on Ukraine, making it all the more interesting that it would publish a piece dedicated to the contradictions in that discussion when it comes to World War 2.

Lviv-based teacher and historian Oleksandr Sapronov lists what he sees as five of these contradictions: the focus on Ukrainians who fought outside of the Soviet military, despite this number being dwarfed by the number of Soviet-Ukrainian servicemen; the inability to decide whether the Ukrainian Soviet republic was a Ukrainian state or an occupation regime; the question of whether the outcome of World War 2 should be considered a victory for Ukraine; the question of whether, if Ukrainians in the Soviet military are considered equally Ukrainian as those fighting in the UPA, that period should be considered as a sort of civil war; And the question of what should be done with the memory of Soviet soldiers.

Here is a translated version of the piece, which I’ve tried to shorten as much as possible for this newsletter (it’s still pretty long). As usual, the translation is mostly the work of machines, apologies in advance for any mistakes:

I think about our World War 2 over and over again, and the puzzle just won't fit together in my head. I was on the radio on May 8, talking about the place and role of Ukraine during World War 2, and I realized that I still don't fully know how to talk about it. [...] I constantly feel a sense of cognitive dissonance at the very least, and hypocrisy at the very most.

First—we've been using two different narratives about World War 2, and it seems like everyone's fine with it. Initially and for a long time, we had the concept of the “Great Patriotic War”, which, obviously, was not written by us, and this was a problem. [...] For the last 10 years, we have also been emphasizing that Ukrainians fought not only as part of the Soviet army during World War 2, and it's good to talk about that. We had the UPA, other formations of the resistance movement, there were Ukrainians in the Polish army, in the allied armies—the American, the French, the British.

But, on the other hand, the number of Ukrainians in non-Soviet armies does not even reach half a million, while 6-7 million Ukrainians fought in the Soviet military. The denial of the Ukrainian-Soviet contribution to the victory over Nazism looks a bit strange, at least from a simple mathematical point of view. At some point, a sense began to emerge that the only rightful Ukrainians in World War 2 were those serving in the UPA. All the others were complex, dubious, and not fit to be turned into the heroes that everyone so desperately wanted to find in World War 2.

Second—we still aren't sure what the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic means to us. On the one hand, the Ukrainian SSR emerged as a result of the war with the Ukrainian People's Republic, and, obviously, not without the help of Russian Bolsheviks. Our narrative about the Ukrainian SSR is still quite unambiguous: from 1920 to 1991, Ukraine was under Russian/Soviet occupation. On the other hand, the Ukrainian SSR was legally a Ukrainian Soviet state. At least it had all the external signs of statehood.

Lately, I have been encountering timid voices saying we should speak of the Ukrainian nation in the 20th century as a state, albeit not a sovereign one. A kind of analogue of the Cossack Hetmanate after Mazepa, with external signs of autonomy and subjectivity but no real autonomy. But for some reason, we consider Skoropadsky, Apostol, Polubotko, and Razumovsky to be Ukrainian hetmans, but it is still not fully clear whether Skrypnyk, Rakovsky, Khrushchev, and Shelest headed the Ukrainian Soviet statehood or the occupation administration. Now, a somewhat childish position dominates when it comes to the Ukrainian SSR: everything that was good in the Ukrainian SSR is ours, and everything that was bad is the Russians'. [...]

Third—what does victory in World War II mean to us? Were we defeated, or did we win?

Whenever we talk about a victorious nation, it is worth asking one question: what did this victory give us? Can we really feel the results of this victory? For France or Great Britain, the victory over Nazism is obvious, because these countries can truly say: the victory over Nazism gave us the opportunity to live and develop our countries as independent. What did the victory give to Ukrainians? It's difficult for me to answer. We returned to the same place, to the totalitarian communist union. [...]

Fourth—if we say that Soviet Ukrainians are also ours, why don't we then say that during World War 2 we also had elements of a civil war? If the Ukrainian SSR was an occupation structure, everything is clear. [...] But if the Ukrainians in the Red Army are the same Ukrainians as the Ukrainians in the UPA, then where do we put the facts of the long and brutal struggle of these two Ukraines? We avoid this uncomfortable question and end up with another cognitive dissonance: Soviet Ukrainians expelled the Nazis from Ukraine while simultaneously fighting Ukrainian nationalists. [...]

Fifth—what should we do with the memory of Soviet soldiers? In recent years, our “nation of victors” has been very abstract and impersonal. There is simply a 6-million-strong mass that fought against Nazism. Soviet general officers have long ceased to be Ukrainians, they have been decommunized, like members of the Communist Party. [...] We are ashamed of any name of a Soviet soldier, because it raises many uncomfortable questions. [...]

There are three possible ways to overcome these contradictions. The first is simpler, and we have come closest to it, the second and third are more complex and so far unlikely.

1. We agree that the Ukrainian SSR is not a Ukrainian state, or not a state at all. We say clearly that it is a product of the Russian occupation and that the Ukrainians who served this regime were blind cannon fodder at best and collaborators at worst. But then we will have to abandon the game of being a victorious nation and simply say: we are a victim of two occupations, Nazi-German and communist-Russian.

2. We take responsibility for the Ukrainian SSR and say that Ukrainians are also the creators of this quasi-state entity and were consciously involved in many of its actions. To take at least a little responsibility for the war against the UNR, for the difficulties of industrialization, for anti-religious campaigns and collective farms. Then we could more honestly talk about the victory over Nazism, but this would largely overturn the national narrative of the eternal struggle with Russia.

3. We can try to say that World War 2 for Ukrainians is a combination of a national liberation, civil, and aggressive war. We finally end the black-and-white World War 2, when most of the year our “reds” are occupiers and rapists, and then once a year they become the “nation of victors”. We need to try to explain the Red Army, the UPA, the SS division ‘Galicia’, and the various currents of the resistance movement, without trying to mix them on one plate or to oppose them—because that’s impossible. As a result, World War 2 will end up looking less heroic, or not heroic at all. But it will be more honest.

For a long time, we have been dragged along in the “Great Patriotic War” bandwagon. But now we want, on the one hand, to write the most anti-Russian history of World War 2 (understandably so), while at the same time not falling out of the pan-European collective matrix of “reconciliation and victory over Nazism” (also understandably so).

As a result, our World War 2 is like mixing Pepsi, beer, tea, and a drizzle of oil on top. It may look interesting and mysterious, but it's impossible to drink.

Democracy under threat

First up is a widely commented piece from The Economist published last week with an eye-catching headline: “Power is being monopolised in Ukraine”.

Quick recap of the story’s thesis: in Ukraine, the three-year-long war has led to political power being increasingly concentrated into the hands of Volodymyr Zelensky and his closest advisors. Criticism of the president has become near impossible; Zelensky has openly targeted his main opponent, president Petro Poroshenko, freezing his assets and branding him a “threat to national security”; the threat of military mobilization is being used to silence civil society activists; A handful of people close to Zelensky now concentrate most powers, and anyone deemed too independent is fired; Critical media is also seen as a threat. The author concludes by describing these events as a “move towards authoritarian rule”, raising the specter of a Zelensky dictatorship.

I have a couple of problems with this story.

The first problem is that almost all of the (real) issues the story looks at feel a lot more like standard Ukrainian politics rather than a new trend fueled by the war. A powerful head of the president’s office, harassment of civil society activists, loyalty being favored over competence in ministerial appointments… none of this is good, quite obviously, but all of this was already happening long before the Russian invasion. Even Petro Poroshenko’s troubles, which are indeed hard to see as anything other than politically motivated, are nothing new: I’ve been in Ukraine long enough to remember seeing Poroshenko address supporters immediately after leaving the Pechersk district court.

It was June 2020, Poroshenko was facing a possible pre-trial arrest as a suspect in a criminal case that most Western embassies saw as politically motivated, and the former president was hyping up the crowd, saying he was the target of political repression and warning of an authoritarian Zelensky (I still have a picture of one of his supporter raising a sign with the silhouette of Poroshenko facing the combined silhouettes of Zelensky and Putin—it was a different time). It’s also worth mentioning that this kind of pressure has been almost exclusively targeted at Poroshenko, and is likely explained at least in good part by the personal enmity between Zelensky and Poroshenko.

Again, none of this is innocuous, but none of this is new. At the same time, the piece does not focus on what is actually new: the hollowing out of institutions caused by the wartime power vertical. Andriy Yermak is powerful and influential, sure—Kuchma’s head of the presidential administration Dimitry Tabachnyk was so powerful and influential the term “Dimakratiya” (a pun on “democracy” and “Dima”, the diminutive for Dimitry) was coined to describe Ukrainian politics at his time. The difference is that a lot of the alternative centers of powers that existed at the time have been severely weakened, with Zelensky demanding a more streamlined chain of decision that often circumvent traditional institutions (most obvious example of this is when it comes to foreign policy, where Yermak has sidelined the ministry of foreign affairs as much as possible). The Economist’s story does point out that “independent” ministers have long been sent packing—people with their own fiefdoms, resources or political bases who, in pre-war Ukraine, would have been able to balance out or even challenge the presidential influence. The process arguably started under Zelensky before the invasion, but the war definitely sustained it beyond what would have been possible otherwise.

But, incredibly, the piece barely mentions the parliament. The Rada’s authority, influence and competence have utterly nosedived in the past three years, something increasingly worrying as there are many elements of the ongoing peace negotiations that may require the parliament’s involvement. This is maybe the biggest impact the war has had on Ukraine’s political process, as MPs who entered the political scene with little experience in 2019 are now utterly exhausted and, for many of them, unable or unwilling to do their job. The parliament has very little independence, despite Zelensky’s majority being more shaky than ever.

The conclusion of the story is where the biggest problem lies. Ukraine, it argues, is “mov[ing] towards more authoritarian rule” as a consequence of “Volodymyr Zelensky’s increasing monopoly of power”. But Ukraine still has an influential civil society (that, I can attest, has zero qualms criticising Zelensky) and a broader society that still largely supports democratic institutions. There also remains a whole bunch of powerful political and business players who would be happy to present a united front against the threat of an authoritarian Zelensky.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to worry about when it comes to Ukraine’s democracy. There is, frankly, a lot to worry about, a lot more than is discussed here or in the Economist piece. But I can’t help but think that the piece misses the point of the real threat to Ukraine’s democratic system, particularly in a post-war scenario: not dictatorship, but turmoil. Not an authoritarian Zelensky, but a dysfunctional state unable to deal with the avalanche of new issues that would inevitably follow a cessation of hostilities.

The Crimean mirage

The second piece I wanted to highlight is a Substack post by Ukrainian political analyst Anton Shekhovtsov: “Rethinking Crimea”. As Trump repeats demands that Ukraine accept the de jure recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea, Anton Shekhovtsov takes a step back and asks: what does Crimea mean for Ukraine?

Anton Shekhovtsov

Rethinking Crimea

As US President Donald Trump’s attempts to end the Russian-Ukrainian war appear increasingly hopeless, reports have emerged that the US has included recognition of Moscow’s control over Crimea, which was illegally occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014, as part of a proposed “peace deal” to be presented to the Kremlin…

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a year ago · 13 likes · 8 comments · Anton Shekhovtsov

When I first started working in Ukraine, around 2016-17, I couldn’t help but puzzle over the way society had been reacting to the annexation of Crimea. There was, I felt at the time, a distinct absence of any real discussion and self-reflection about the long-term trends that ultimately led to Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula.

This wasn't about accepting the 2014 Russian 'referendum' as anything other than a farcical imitation of democracy. But even this did not answer the question: how was Russia able to seize Crimea so easily? There was, it seemed to me at the time, a palpable unwillingness to grapple with that question, and it was often swept away with explanations that weren’t wrong per se, but failed to address the deeper issues. People mentioned the fragility of the Ukrainian state at the time of the annexation, or how Washington had urged Kyiv not to fight back for fear of escalation.

This didn’t explain how, after nearly a quarter-century of Ukrainian rule, Russia could take control of the region with such limited local resistance. At the time of the annexation (things were different a year before, and they would be a year after), a significant part of the Crimean population either supported or was indifferent to the idea of joining Russia, in an apparent testament to the failure—or the absence—of a nation building project.

The obvious answer to why this wasn’t addressed more is that it was an uncomfortable discussion, one that required recognizing that more than a tiny minority of people supported Russia in Crimea, and one that involved looking critically at what Ukraine did and did not do in the two decades before the Russian annexation.

Maybe this was made even more difficult by the bitter irony that the annexation of Crimea is when, in Ukraine, the peninsula truly stepped out of the shadows as a distinctly Ukrainian place. Crimean Tatars went from being largely ignored to being celebrated, Crimeans who had fled the Russian occupation shared their experience about life in a region that was, until then, seen by most Ukrainians as a vacation destination first and foremost. Ukraine discovered Crimea after it had already lost it.

What makes Anton Shekhovtsov’s piece so valuable then is that it does tackle all these thorny issues in a succinct (you could probably write several books on this one topic) and honest manner. Shekhovtsov lays down the post-Soviet history of a Crimean peninsula left in its own separate dimension, largely ignored by both Ukrainian national-democrats and pro-Russian forces.

Ukrainian pro-Russian political forces viewed Crimea merely as a reservoir of “easy votes” – citizens in Crimea and Sevastopol consistently supported them in all types of elections. […] For their part, Ukrainian national-democrats – who envisioned Ukraine as a largely ethnoculturally homogeneous state – simply did not know what to do with 1.5 million ethnic Russians and hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Crimea and Sevastopol. Crimea was not part of their mental map of Ukraine – if such a map even existed.

Shekhovtsov also looks at the way the Crimean issue has been handled by the post-2014 Ukrainian State and the place of Crimea—the actual place, with its people, not just the geographical entity—within the current Ukrainian national project.

However, none of Kyiv’s efforts aimed at de-occupying Crimea has ever addressed the most obvious and fundamental challenge: even if we momentarily set aside the fact that Crimea is controlled by Russia – and that Russia is unlikely to ever relinquish the peninsula – ethnic Russians remain the majority in both Crimea and Sevastopol. How does this reality fit into the political imagination of Ukrainian national-democrats? Where exactly does Crimea belong within their vision of the Ukrainian national project?

It’s an important discussion just in the context of Crimea, but I’d argue it’s one that goes way beyond the annexed peninsula. It’s really about what Ukraine should be, and what it wants to be.

Then, I wrote a bunch of disjointed reflections about the recent weeks, the negotiation process, and about whether the Russian population’s initial disbelief in the first hours of the Russian invasion can tell us anything about Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end it.

I’ve also recently written for the Financial Times a story about the domestic repercussions of the Trump-Zelensky clash which you can read here.

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Stories

Graty (in Ukrainian & Russian) | Case of the Kharkiv border breach: what does the investigation and the suspects say | March 13

Some detailed court reporting from Ukrainian outlet Graty about the first criminal case targeting Ukrainian military officers. Back in January, law enforcement detained brigadier general Yuriy Halushkin and two of his subordinates (lieutenant general Artur Horbenko and colonel Ilya Lapin, who were at the time respectively commanders of the 125th brigade and of an infantry bataillon of the 23rd brigade). All three are accused of dereliction of duty during the May 2024 Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region.

It would be too long to just recap Graty's piece, but an example of one accusation makes it clear how specific and granular the accusation is:

The investigation claims that the general deliberately assigned to previously mentioned units defense areas that they were unable to defend. The accusation states that the units did not have tanks and armored combat vehicles, and were not staffed with fighters. In particular, the 415th battalion was staffed to 55% of its full strength, and the 172nd and 215th - 66%. In addition, the general did not reinforce them with the above-mentioned five brigades, with which he strengthened the second echelon of defense, and also did not control the conduct of the battle by the commanders of the units that withdrew without orders, etc.

[...]

Colonel Ilya Lapin told "Graty" following the hearing that he is being tried for withdrawing his fighters from positions on May 10 without a direct order from a senior commander. However, he believes that he did the right thing, because he saved the men, took them to a second position, and reinforced the positions of the 1st and 2nd companies that were advancing there. "I made a decision, I am now responsible for this decision. Human life is the most important thing. There will be people - there will be a state and there will be victory," said Lapin.

The investigation, arrests and now hearings have had deep political implications, as the quest to find someone responsible for the Russian advances into the Kharkiv region last year quickly clashed against the need to maintain troop morale and avoid the implication that any retreat could lead to an arrest for the commanding officer (something with heavy Soviet undertones). Ukrainian opposition figures such as Petro Poroshenko seized on the scandal to denounce the authorities, and there’s definitely been a general unease about the procedure.

LINKS | Daria Saburova: ‘We must take an interest in the complex realities of Ukrainian society’ | March 9

A thought-provoking interview about the way Ukraine's working class in the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih (where Volodymyr Zelensky grew up) mobilized after the 2022 Russian invasion. Among many other things, it serves as a reminder of the massive but often underrated role that non-professional volunteers played in this war. Saburova’s research also highlights the important point that a lot of people who decided to organize themselves in order to confront the Russian invasion did so with different views from what I'd call (a bit reductively, I admit) the ‘Kyiv consensus’—from language to historical references to economic reforms.

Novosti Donbassa (in Ukrainian & Russian) | Belarus' "white passport" for Ukrainians: testimonies from those who crossed the border | February 26

Over the past three years, the movement of Ukrainians to and from the regions occupied by Russia never fully stopped. It was relatively easy for only a couple of months, when a corridor through the frontline allowed convoys of cars and trucks to enter and leave Russian-controlled Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhia region. That route closed in the fall of 2022, after Moscow officially annexed the region and a strike on the place where the convoys gathered killed several dozen people (I wrote about it in The Long War #10).

Later, a new crossing point was opened in the Sumy region. When fighting intensified in that area, it was moved 800 kilometers West, on the border with Belarus (and just 60 kilometers from the Polish border). Fleeing the occupied territories now involves a days-long, expensive, dangerous and exhausting trip through a war zone, then Russia and Belarus (that's without even getting into the stories of people who, for various reasons, want to go to the occupied territories from Ukraine and have to endure filtration at Moscow airport).

Now, Ukrainian outlet Novosti Donbassa (ND) reported in late February, Belarus has introduced new rules for Ukrainians looking to enter Ukraine from Russia or the occupied territories of Ukraine at the Mokrany-Domanov humanitarian corridor. It isn't a border crossing point—only Ukrainian citizens can use it, they can only cross on foot, and only from Belarus to Ukraine.

It used to be, ND writes, that Belarusian border guards would let Ukrainians cross with any official Ukrainian document, such as a driver's license, ID card or birth certificate. But they now require an actual passport, which many Ukrainians do not have. Hence the "white passport", the nickname of the "travel document for return to Ukraine" now delivered by the Ukrainian consulate in Minsk (keep in mind that just getting to Belarus is near-impossible if you don't already have a Russian ID). The procedure can take up to a month, forcing Ukrainians to find lodging in Belarus for several weeks after an already grueling trip.

I’m highlighting this story for a specific reason: negotiations have now begun which, if successful (a huge ‘if’) would leave under Russian control the parts of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. I recently did an interview with a representative of Zmina, a Ukrainian NGO dealing (among other issues) with the fate of Ukrainians living in occupied territories. Alena Lunova insisted that, in such a situation, negotiators should at the very least fight to reintroduce easier ways for people to leave the occupied territories, as well as prevent Russia from forcing Ukrainians living in occupied territory to get a Russian passport. But while humanitarian issues such as prisoners or Ukrainian children deported to Russia has already been raised, I don’t think there’s still been any discussion about making it easier for people to either leave or travel between the occupied and non-occupied regions of Ukraine.

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Ukrainian Moderna (in Ukrainian) | Oksana Dovgopolova: "Our work in the field of memory should be directed not at Russia, but at ourselves" | February 6

This interview of Oksana Dovgopolova, a Ukrainian researcher specializing in memory issues, is the most interesting piece I’ve read about the ongoing feud surrounding the fate of Odesa monuments linked to the city’s imperial and Soviet past. I’m highlighting a couple of selected quotes, but I encourage readers to put the entire interview through a translation engine:

When it came to dismantling the monument to Catherine II, it was easier because it is only one object, and it wasn’t part of the urban space before. This monument was installed in 2007, that is, it was not there from 1920 to 2007. It was a newly made figure with no historical value. The procedure for demolishing this monument went quite smoothly, because it did not affect the everyday life of the townspeople.

But the processes currently taking place have a significant impact on people's everyday lives. For example, there is a process of mass renaming of streets, and not everyone is ready to accept such a radical reboot of the city's cultural space. This is not due to the fact that there are some pro-Russian people inside Odesa.

[...]

— What historical figures or topics cause the most controversy?

— The biggest debates revolve around Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel. The “Pushkinopad” [movement of taking down statues of Pushkin] has been ongoing since 2022 (it began earlier, but acquired a massive character precisely in 2022). In Odesa, a rethinking of the figure of Pushkin is needed, because in fact, rational arguments are expressed by both sides of the conflict. The monument to Pushkin in Odesa was not erected by Soviet authorities. It’s not like a Pushkin statue in, say, Mukachevo, where nobody knows how it got there and everybody understand that it is a clear marking of the space by Soviet authorities.

On the other hand, the position of those who say that it is now impossible to keep a monument to Pushkin in the space of any Ukrainian city —no matter how it got there— is absolutely understandable, because it is a marking of the Soviet/Russian imperial power. Unfortunately, in our country, any object in public space continues to be perceived exclusively in the context of the glorification of a certain regime. The idea that an object can be redefined does not exist, because there are no successful examples. And people cannot find a common position, because their views are fundamentally different.

The same situation applies to Isaac Babel. By the way, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance admitted the renaming of the Babel street was illegal, because he has no connection to the NKVD, which is what he was accused of. There are no documents confirming this fact. Therefore, in Odesa, on the one hand, a movement is spreading in defense of this figure, and on the other, voices are being raised to remove the monument to Babel. Another aspect, not related to the NKVD, plays a significant role here: Babel is accused of developing a version of the myth of Odessa as a bandit city, as a city of gangsters, that is, researchers of the Odessa myth have been fighting Babel for a long time.

Picture

Yet another indication of the great Western shift that Ukraine has undergone since the beginning of the Russian invasion: agricultural land is now consistently at the highest price in Western Ukraine. In early March, one hectare of land in the Lviv region was 3 times more expensive than in the central and agricultural region of Kirovohrad (prices have since gone down in the Lviv region, but the general trend seems to hold).

Thoughts

On time

A month ago, Ukraine commemorated the third anniversary of the Russian invasion. It only struck me a couple of days ago how long three years really is. At a very personal level, I’ve now lived in Ukraine for almost as long post-invasion as I did before (I had been a Kyiv-based correspondent from early 2018 to early 2021, and settled back in Ukraine in August 2022). More generally, the first Russo-Ukrainian war arguably lasted one year exactly*, from the February 2014 annexation of Crimea to the February 2015 Minsk 2 agreement. The war didn’t stop then of course, but kept going as a simmering conflict that, even in Ukraine, started fading into the background. Three years of such a violent and bloody war is really hard to process. It becomes even longer when you look at it from the perspective of teenagers, as I did for a recent story, kids who were just 15 or 16 when the invasion started, who are now entering university and, if they’re boys, cannot legally leave the country anymore. Three years and already a youth irreparably damaged.

(*I realize this a bit of an uncommon view, but I do think that, while there is of course a strong continuity in the events from 2014 to today, there are three distinct periods running from February 2014 to mid-2015; from mid-2015 to February 2022; and from February 2022 to the present day)

On negotiations

Being a correspondent living in Kyiv, the most striking feature of the recent weeks of Ukraine-US-Russia negotiations is how far from Ukraine it’s been happening, something that has translated to working on the phone and behind the laptop rather covering the story on the ground. I don’t think it is necessarily ominous in itself (negotiations happening in the country of a third party is pretty standard, after all) but it does add to the growing sense that things are now being decided outside of Ukraine.

On surprise, Russian society and ending the war

One aspect of this war I still think about three years on is how, even a few days before the first Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, Russia as a whole—from the most conservative, pro-Putin figures to the most opposition-minded liberals—found the idea of a Russian invasion utterly ridiculous. Nobody in Russia believed Moscow would invade and, crucially, nobody believed it would be a good idea to invade. Then, when Russia did invade, most of the Russian population almost immediately accepted and (at least openly) supported the war.

I remember thinking that, even for a population broadly supportive of Putin, an outright, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine would be a step too far. I remember colleagues who said there wouldn’t be an invasion because there were no signs that the Kremlin was preparing its population to such an invasion by, say, ramping up the propaganda on its TV channels. And I wonder what historians will make of this, of the shock that Russian society experienced when the war began, and why that shock so quickly translated into support rather than revolt.

I think that shock was instrumental in getting the Russian population to accept the war—Putin didn’t just hope to stun Ukraine into surrender, but also the rest of Russia into compliance, a general fait accompli. That’s not to say there wasn’t any preparations: there was ten years of those, since the annexation of Crimea. Preparations that suppressed any desire to protest and even prompted thousands of Russians to call their relatives in Ukraine in the early hours of the invasion to tell them Russia was going to liberate them—or that they deserved what was happening after “bombing Donbas for eight years”.

Does that matter today? I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking that this could be yet another factor making Putin reluctant to a ceasefire: even a temporary end of the hostilities would likely be welcomed in Russia, particularly if it comes with the lifting of sanctions, and that relief could make it harder for Putin to restart the war. Putin’s reluctance to declare a new wave of mobilization shows well enough that he is sensitive to public opinion, after all. Putin wouldn’t be able to rely once more on the paralyzing shock of the initial invasion, meaning that stopping the war now would make it harder for him to start it again if he wanted to.

But then again, relaunching the war after a ceasefire wouldn’t be like starting it in the first place. The Rubicon has been crossed, the bell has been rung. So maybe that does not matter.

I’ll start with an unremarkable piece of news that nevertheless caught my eye, bringing me back to some reporting I did several years ago: on January 2, a commission from Ukraine’s Culture Ministry announced it had added 11 museum items to the state register of national cultural heritage. Among those 11 artworks is ‘Suprematism 65’, a painting claimed to be by Kazimir Malevych.

It happens that, five years ago now, I traveled deep into the Kharkiv region and visited the small museum where that painting is exhibited. I then wrote what remains one of my favorite stories I’ve ever worked on while in Ukraine—the story of a museum claiming to own an incredible collection of world-renowned, priceless masterpieces, from Malevych to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Kandinsky, and the story of how those doubtful attributions came to be. It’s a story that combines national myth-making, Soviet cultural politics of the 60s, and the towering figure of one ambitious and charismatic history teacher. Readers of this newsletter would enjoy it, I think.

While we’re looking at the past—in the course of doing some research for a story about the end of the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine, I came across this bit of news from the New York Times, circa 1968. It is a report about the very first gas deal between the Soviet Union and a Western country—Austria. Interestingly, that gas didn’t come from faraway Siberia at the time, but from the gas fields of Western Ukraine. The first to consume Soviet and later Russian gas, Austria won’t be the last: in November, Gazprom stopped supplying the country.

But back to the present. Rather, no, let’s stay in the past, albeit the recent past. Ukraina Moderna, a website publishing texts by Ukrainian academics, published a fascinating anthropological dive into a fairly incredible situation dating from the very first days of the Russian invasion: a group of Ukrainian soldiers who captured the Russian crew of a T-90 tank, before being themselves taken prisoner by Russian forces a few days later.

The capture of the Russian tank crew on February 26 happens with disarming casualness, with one of the Ukrainian soldiers (most of them volunteers who had taken up arms just two days before) saying they didn’t even think to tie their prisoners’ hands:

Left without fuel, the tank became easy prey. Andrey Frolkov's volunteer detachment managed to capture the crew of the T90 tank, which had lost communication with its convoy and had been left to its fate. According to Valeriy Poznyak, “their radio was working, they waited for their own for a long time, then they were freezing, hungry, something had to be done and they decided to abandon the tank and go wherever.”

MG: They didn't resist?

VP: No, no, they didn't resist.

MG: So they raised their hands when you approached?

VP Yes, yes. They raised their hands, that's it, we disarmed them, took off their bulletproof vests, took off their clothes.

Things happen very differently when, a day later, the group of Ukrainian soldiers find themselves captured:

VP: Two tanks immediately drove up to us, standing in the center of the road, […] [Russian] soldiers started running and shooting at us above our heads. Then they ordered us to lie down. We got out of the cars, laid down, and they immediately handcuffed us. And since Serhiy and I were the first, they jumped us, that is, they beat us both. […] They broke two of my ribs, hit me on the head with a boot. […] Well, I turned my head to look, and he hit me on the head with his foot […] I can say that I was definitely saying goodbye to life at least three times. There were several times when I thought “that’s it!”.

But even then, the relationship between the Ukrainian prisoners and the Russian guards quickly evolves, as the Russian troops start engaging in conversation with their prisoners. There’s a big emphasis from the Ukrainian soldiers about the moment when the Russian troops guarding them switched from the informal “ty” to the formal and more respectful “vy” to address them.

The soldiers of the military police unit of the Russian Armed Forces did not hide their desire to communicate with the Ukrainian prisoners. They listened to the Ukrainian side with interest, without aggression, and on their part, showing confusion and stress.

VP: This [Russian] guy, who has been to Syria three times, he knows what's what. He says: “My rights have been violated. I was not warned, I did not sign anything that I would take part in the fighting.” And practically everyone who communicated with us was not in the mood to fight at all. That is, he was so, well, I understand, they did not understand why they were here and what they were doing here. And what is the goal of this war in general.

There’s also this unexpected scene, given the reputation that Chechen troops would earn later in the war:

IM: The Chechens—all those guys who were Muslims—they treated us better than anyone else, and there was an uncle who… well, an uncle. He was in his forties… He brought us tea in a thermos, and he brought us some cookies, he gave his sweater to those who were freezing, that is, he treated us very… that is, he treated us very humanly. So the Muslims treated us better than anyone else.

AF: Then in the morning an Uzbek sergeant came, and I asked him: “What are you? Who are you?” He says: “I am Uzbek” And he brought a thermos of hot tea. He pours it for me, says: “Drink it”. And they didn’t even give us water, because they didn’t have any water themselves. And he says to me: “Drink it”. I say: “Come on, our guys are wounded, let’s eat first”. And he gave both Sergey and Valery Semenovich a drink. He says: “I’ll make some more tea now”. He left, they lit a fire.

One of the soldiers guarding came from the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (DNR), the Russia-backed Donbas statelet that Moscow annexed in 2022—meaning that man was, or had been, Ukrainian:

AF: And then there was one who was a DNR citizen from Makiivka, he spoke Ukrainian better than me. He came up to me and said [in Ukrainian]: “Well, what’s that, strawberries – some kind of berry”. (…) I look at him, and he says: “Why are you looking at me like that!? My mother is a Ukrainian language teacher in Makiivka”. – “So why are you fighting then?” – “I’ve been fighting since 2015” – “Why are you fighting?” – “So what, I don’t have anything else to do, and I really want to go to Odessa to relax, to sunbathe. (…) We don’t have work, they grab us on the street, we have nothing to do”.

This isn't even an isolated event—I remember meeting a man in the town of Izium in September 2022 (it had just been liberated by Ukrainian forces) who also said he talked with several Russian soldiers from the DNR who spoke fluent Ukrainian.

What makes this account so striking to me is how remote it now feels. At a time when reports of Ukrainian soldiers being captured and immediately executed by Russian troops surface weekly, it is almost disorienting to read about Russian soldiers confused by the decision to invade, going about their work with little enthusiasm and little hate, simply expecting this unpleasant business to be over soon. The fact that the war has lasted almost three years, the sheer brutality of the fighting, the losses both sides have endured all make an interaction like this hard to imagine today. The way the war is now fought—deadly, small-scale infantry assaults under a sky saturated with drones—makes it pretty much impossible.

ICYMI

Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days

• Zeit / And yet he remained a human—an interview with Maksym Butkevych

• The Washington Post / As another Trump presidency nears, Ukraine’s army is on the defensive

• The New York Times / How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine

• The New York Times / A Gas Cutoff Sends Shivers Through a Russian-Backed Breakaway Region

• NPR / Ukrainian soldiers and shopkeepers hold on as Russia's siege of Pokrovsk tightens

Beyond this, I don’t really want to do an extensive reminiscence of the past 11 months—there’s only so many ways you can talk about uncertainty and exhaustion. In the short term, the main question is where the frontline will stand when Donald Trump steps into the White House. Will Ukraine be able to stabilize the frontline, will Russia’s mind-numbing losses finally lead to the culmination of its year-long offensive? It’s something people have been predicting (or hoping) for many months now, and Moscow has a strong incentive to push as much as possible before January 20, so more Russian advances are unfortunately likely.

There’s a strange cognitive dissonance right now in Ukraine, a vague feeling that we’re maybe—maybe—approaching some sort of resolution, as negotiations will surely begin under Trump’s pressure, even as the facts on the ground still make it incredibly hard to see how even a simple ceasefire could come about in the near future. But then again, facts on the ground can change.

One last thing: I want to hear from you, dear reader! You are a very diverse bunch of subscribers, and I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts, about this newsletter or about Ukraine in general.

Something to read

Hromadske visited Stara Nekrasivka, a village in the Odesa region still largely populated by Old Believers who also happen to be ethnic Russians. It’s a village where people are still more often attached to their religious and Bessarabian identity than their Ukrainian one, where some men went to join the Ukrainian military and others explain it by "propaganda", where modernity nevertheless seeps in, where many people who don't see Russia as an enemy still have to endure the regular passage of kamikaze drones. It is quite fascinating.

Another way to witness the war's impact: Ekonomichna Pravda shows on a map the amount of taxes levied by every Ukrainian hromada (district) compared to before the invasion. The map shows an unsurprising turn West, with the 70 hromadas of the Lviv region registering a 64% growth in local taxes raised compared to 2021, the highest growth of all regions. Yet the contrast on the map isn’t as sharp as one may expect, with many districts in the country’s East having also increased their amount of taxes levied. That is in large part because people who flee war and occupation often try to remain as close as possible to their homes, settling in villages or towns sometimes only a few dozen kilometers away from the frontline.

Babel took an interesting approach to discuss the problems within the Ukrainian military, dividing its piece between problems at three levels: operational-tactical (quoting an anonymous officer who worked in a brigade's command staff), operational (headquarters commanding several brigades on a portion of the front) and strategic (General staff).

Odesa-based outlet Dumskaya looks into the local black market for weapons. The piece doesn't do a great job at explaining the scale of the problem, but one quote provides an interesting insight into the way the chaos of war can lead to weapons being sold thousands of kilometers away: the lion share of weapons currently on the black market are reportedly made either of trophy Russian weapons, or of weapons abandoned near the frontline during the evacuation of wounded servicemen or when soldiers are killed in action.

From Poltava (halfway between Kyiv and Kharkiv), local outlet Poltavshyna wrote about a topic that unfortunately now concerns all of Ukraine: how to remember local soldiers killed at the front. Local authorities started installing in the city’s main park steles showing the portraits of soldiers killed in action, which prompted a local blogger to complain about “drinking coffee in a cemetery”—understandably outraging families of veterans and soldiers. But the issue isn’t an easy one: while there is a huge demand for the public commemoration of every individual soldier who died at the front (something that was done between 2014 and 2022, with schools, streets and squares often renamed to honor defunct local soldiers), the sheer scale of the losses has made this public, individual remembrance much more difficult.

Things I wrote about this year

Death has been an inescapable topic. I wrote about a journalist in the Poltava region painstakingly combing social media to publish a weekly toll of local soldiers killed on the frontline; about a soldier mentioned in one of these reports, a man in his fifties, mobilized in September 2023, killed five months later; about the struggles of remembrance, and the thousands of families publishing petitions on the website of the Ukrainian presidency to get their son, father or brother killed in action recognized as “hero of Ukraine”—the highest state award—even though an extremely small portion of these petitions have been successful; about a gravedigger in Pokrovsk, who kept burying people even as the sound of artillery crashed in the background.

Mobilization is another unavoidable topic. Early in the year, I went to villages in central and eastern Ukraine, and witnessed the familiar scenes of farmers lacking fieldhands, companies hiring women, local village officials handing out summons, complaints about mobilization having emptied the villages of their able-bodied men, about mobilization targeting the countryside and sparing the big cities. More recently, I looked at the political aspect of mobilization, about the activists and the soldiers asking for a complete change of model, for a move towards a full mobilization that (according to them) would be the only way of relieving exhausted troops—and I also looked at Zelensky’s reluctance to head that way.

Back in May, I wrote a report for the Financial Times about Chasiv Yar and the town's importance for the Ukrainian defensive strategy. At the time, I think most people expected the town to fall in the following weeks, or by summertime at the latest. Unbelievably, it is still currently in (partial) Ukrainian control. But almost as unbelievably, the Russian offensive is still ongoing—most people expected it to culminate at some point in the summer, when the combined effect of Russian losses, replenishment of Ukrainian troops thanks to the new mobilization law as well as the arrival of U.S military aid would start having effect.

And I wrote about justice—the ordinary kind. I spent a few days following audiences at the Kherson city court, trying to understand the point of keeping a tribunal in a half-empty city under constant threat of bombardment. For some, it was a pointless endeavor, one in which a judge would often sit alone in a courtroom, prosecutors and lawyers speaking through a webcam from Mykolaiv or Odesa, witnesses, defendants, victims and case files lost during the occupation. Others believed it to be a crucial step to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and authority in the only regional capital occupied by Russian forces. It was impressive, daunting, sad and surreal all at the same time—the cases of petty theft from before the occupation (which may just as well been a decade ago), the desperate need to get back to a routine for the employees who survived the entire occupation, the sheer mass of collaboration cases.

Something to read

Zaxid (in Ukrainian) | The movie “Bucha” came out—why is it causing so much controversy? | November 8

This piece from the Lviv-based regional outlet Zaxid is a pretty scathing review of “Bucha”, a Ukrainian movie about the 2022 massacre perpetrated by Russian forces in the eponymous town. “Bucha” is, it seems, simply not a very good movie, one that “feels like a random set of scenes, as the director painstakingly reproduces stories known from news reports” with “cardboard characters” and messy attempts “at creating a ‘nice picture’”. But more interesting to me are the questions it raises about the hurry to create art about a war even as that same war is going on, something that feels both extremely understandable and very perilous.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a Ukrainian poet in late 2022, who shook his head when I asked him if he thought there had already been powerful works of literature about the invasion—“‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ wasn’t published in 1916” he simply said. The other issue highlighted by the author of this piece is the defense used by the movie’s team when faced with criticism: the rush to shoot and release a movie about this event was explained by the need to counter Russian propaganda (“While you and I quarrel and blame each other, the Russians make movies and show them to the world” said Vyacheslav Dovzhenko, one of the movie’s leading actor) while critics were blamed for lacking patriotism. Given how sensitive and difficult the topic, it isn’t surprising that this rhetoric triggered controversy.

DeepState (in Ukrainian) | Gliding bombs are the hammer of the Russian Federation—do Ukrainian forces need them too? | November 10

A really interesting look at what makes gliding bombs so effective in the current war. The author writes that Russia now increasingly relies on infiltration tactics by small units (reminiscent of stormtrooper tactics developed by the German military during World War 1), with gliding bombs representing a convenient form of fire support in preparation of these assaults. Thanks to these bombs, Russian forces don’t have to rely so much on artillery, which has suffered significant losses in recent months; The Russian air force retains a significant fleet of bombers, so it has the capacity to launch these munitions in large numbers and from airfields located at a safe distance from the frontline; and while gliding bombs can’t hit moving targets, Ukrainian forces now fight in a largely defensive and static manner, often from poorly-prepared fortifications that cannot withstand a strike from one or several gliding bombs. Gliding bombs are, essentially, near-ideal against this type of warfare.

The same factors explain why those bombs likely wouldn’t be nearly as effective in the hands of Ukrainian forces:

The size of the Ukrainian air force cannot in any way compete with the Russian air force, the aviation infrastructure is much more limited, airfields are often hit by enemy ballistic missiles and front-line bases are even attacked by Lancet kamikaze UAVs. On the other hand, the Russian Air Defense Forces is a real force capable of performing a wide range of tasks: along with fighter aircrafts, Russian air defence is able to "press" Ukrainian aircrafts to the ground. In such conditions, effective and relatively safe use of gliding bombs is practically impossible. It is also worth mentioning the Russian fortifications, the quality of which in many places significantly exceeds the Ukrainian ones.

Babel (in Ukrainian) | In a nursing home hit by Russia, evacuations, memories, pictures and a bit of romance | October 21

The gut-wrenching visit of a nursing home in the Sumy region hit by a Russian air strike in September, killing one 78-year-old woman and injuring 12 people. Nursing homes aren’t common in Ukraine: in 2023, the country had just 238 of them, nearly ten times less than Canada (which has a similar population). These are often underfunded, gloomy places where only those with no one left to take care of them end up.

The boarding house opened in 1989. The average age of its residents was over eighty, though a few of them were what they’d call young—60 to 70 years old. All were in poor health, suffered from disabilities. More than two-thirds were bedridden or couldn’t walk. The vast majority had no relatives, except for distant nephews and cousins, or great-grandchildren. There were old women from the occupied territories — Chasiv Yar, Bakhmut, Luhansk — in the nursing home. Others came from villages in the Sumy region, where people's houses were bombed.

[...]

No one will return to the nursing home in the coming years. At best, it will be transferred to another city, far from the Russian border. The minimum distance should be 50 kilometers (the nursing home was about 30 kilometers from the border). Since then, the Sumy military administration has been looking for a place to resettle people. However, there are few geriatric institutions in Ukraine. They could find nursing homes in other regions offering 20-30 places, but they needed 200. 45 people managed to be taken to the Khmelnytskyi region, and to Kyiv. Others were placed in institutions in the Sumy region, crowding out people.

Ekonomichna Pravda (in Ukrainian) | The heart of Ukrainian metallurgy. What consequences will the loss of Pokrovsk have for the economy? | Oct 25

This piece explains quite clearly why the Akhmetov-owned Pokrovsk coal mine might be a crucial target for Russia: with more than 40 years of reserve of high-quality coal used to make steel (the only mine in Ukraine where you can get this coke), the mine could allow Russia to restart a metallurgical industry in the occupied territories. It is located 10 kilometers west of Pokrovsk, which currently puts it about 20 kilometers from the frontline. In 2023, around 90% of the coal used to make steel in Ukraine came from the Pokrovsk mine, meaning that its loss would further cripple an already devastated Ukrainian metallurgical industry, with steel plants likely unable to important enough coke to compensate for the loss.

Zhyttya (in Ukrainian) | Why is bilingualism dangerous, and gentle Ukrainization no longer relevant? An interview with the language Ombudsman | October 24

A depressing interview with the chief Ukrainian official tasked with enacting the country's language law. Taras Kremin calls for a broad fight against bilingualism in Ukraine, beyond what the current legislation envisions, based in part on the pseudoscientific concept of "language schizophrenia". It’s not a statement that seems to foreshadow any legislative changes (it wasn’t the result of a specific discussion, nor did it trigger any official initiatives or comments, as far as I can tell), but it’s not one you can dismiss out of hand either. Talking mostly based on things I’ve seen or heard myself, it seems pretty clear that there an increasing pressure on Russian speakers in Ukraine—but one that comes from society and peers rather than the state (a recent “language conflict” in a Kyiv bookstore is a good example of that). Still: looking at reactions to the interview on Facebook, there are quite a few Ukrainian speakers who vehemently disagree with Kremin's views.

ICYMI

Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days

• Reuters / Ukraine battles to shape 'starting positions' for any war talks after Trump return

• The Economist / Kremlin-occupied Ukraine is now a totalitarian hell

• The Wall Street Journal / Ukraine Is Scavenging for Power-Plant Parts as Mass Blackouts Loom

• The Washington Post / Waiting for the North Koreans on the battlefields of the Ukraine war

• Politico / Kyiv strains to see Trump’s true plan for Ukraine

• The New York Times / How Ukraine’s Widows Are Shouldering Their Grief

• The Independent / The road to Ukraine’s Kurakhove is known as ‘the road of death’ – residents refuse to leave

KYIV—When I started this newsletter two years ago, I decided to call it ‘The Long War’ for two reasons. First, and most obviously, I believed this war would last a long time. But I also thought that, even if I ended up being wrong, even if the war was to end a few weeks after I had launched this newsletter, it would have already been such a disaster for Ukraine that its consequences would shape the country for years and decades after. It was a war that couldn’t be anything but long.

This war has now been going on for two years and eight months, almost a thousand days, and that’s of course without counting the period from 2014 to 2022. I don’t know if that counts as long—being French means I’ll automatically think back to World War 1 as the ‘standard’ length of a war. Two years and eight months into World War 1 was April 1917. The Russian revolution was well underway, and the U.S. had that month declared war on Germany—the first U.S. troops would land in France two months later (though they wouldn’t see combat for another full year).

Back in September, I again wondered how long this war could possibly last. It is foolish to try and predict the ebb and flow of such a massive military conflict, but so it is to ignore the deeper trends, all of which seemed to go against Ukraine. This was even before North Korean troops entered the fight (I am, by the way, baffled to see so many pundits interpret this as a sign of Kremlin desperation—that fact is that Russia has now been able to fight for two years, including an almost entire year of constant offensive during which its military suffered horrendous losses, without having to resort to a new wave of mobilization. That’s not desperation.)

Ukrainian forces were being pressed along the entire frontline, not collapsing but not showing any signs of stabilization either. After a couple of months during which mobilization picked up, I heard from several sources that the tempo had already slowed down, Zelensky seemingly still reluctant to risk the social unrest that could come with an even more intense mobilization. Among frontline troops, the feeling that too many civilians have stopped paying attention to the war had become increasingly common: a Ukrainian soldier positioned near Siversk who had always told me how opposed he was to any kind of forced conscription (“I don’t want to fight alongside someone who doesn’t want to be there”, he used to say) recently texted me that “there’s this thought going around among soldiers that things would maybe get better if Kyiv was surrounded again”, a sort of bitter nostalgia for the urgency of the invasion’s opening phase. Then there was the prospect of Russia finally and fully destroying Ukraine's energy system, or the multitude of signals showing the West's commitment wavering. The only thing going for Ukraine was the scale of Russian losses, both in people and in armored vehicles, which made it likely that fighting would slow down in 2025.

But now, Donald Trump has been elected. On paper, nothing has changed. Ukraine’s military predicament is still as dire, the question of where the country will stand by winter’s end still as tense. And yet, while nobody can say what Trump's election will mean for Ukraine, there is in the country an unmistakable and widely shared feeling that a new chapter has opened, that the current trajectory of the war is going to be interrupted, for better or for worse. Nearly three years into the war, there are going to be public and open attempts at negotiation, and that in itself is already a huge break from the current situation.

It is likely to trigger renewed discussion and debate inside the country, especially if those talks make any sort of progress. There may be questions, people pointing out that, if negotiations can happen now, maybe they could have happened before—Ukraine is celebrating today the second anniversary of the liberation of Kherson, and this reminded me of an April 2024 interview in which Taras Chmut, the head of “Come Back Alive” (Ukraine’s biggest fundraising organization for the military) said that “maybe negotiations should have come earlier—after Kharkiv and Kherson, we had a strong position”. The fact of the matter is that now is probably the second worst time since the beginning of the invasion for Ukraine to start negotiations (the first worst time being in March 2022, when Russian forces still had a bridgehead of the right bank of the Dnieper and controlled a big part of the Kharkiv region).

But I honestly can’t see how these negotiations could, in the short term, lead even to a simple ceasefire—the idea of NATO troops guarding a demilitarized zone seems like an obvious non-starter for Moscow, as are strong security guarantees for Ukraine. The Kremlin will want a small Ukrainian military and no Western support, which is unacceptable for Kyiv (and even if it was acceptable, how would Moscow enforce it?) unless it has no choice—unless it has capitulated (for more on this, Sergey Radchenko has already what is currently the best, most succinct explanation of why these negotiations will be so challenging). In any case, it is still too early to discuss talks that may not happen at all, may flounder immediately, may officially start but go at a snail’s pace as the Kremlin tries to buy time. The war is, probably, going to continue.

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Something to read

Ukrainian Analytical Digest | The war of maps? Spatial (mis)représentations of the Russo-Ukrainian War in the digital context | September

Cartography is one of those niche topics I remain consistently fascinated by, making me particularly happy to see the Ukrainian Analytical Digest dedicate a full issue—six articles—to maps in the context of the war. I am honestly surprised this topic hasn't been explored more deeply until now: from showing territorial control to listing bomb shelters, from warning of missile attacks to highlighting Ukraine's precarious position next to its huge neighbor, maps have been everywhere in this war. One article looks in particular at how maps have become “increasingly present in the everyday life of Ukrainian citizens as an important element of the daily wartime routine”; Another focuses on the prevalence of cartographic imagery in war-related art; a third one looks more specifically at the cartographic ‘daily updates’ produced by organizations like the famous Institute for the Study of War.

Poltavshyna (in Ukrainian) | Possible local elections in 2025: administrative resources, candidate in power, online voting, angry and apathetic electorate | October 7

Bit of an obscure headline from Poltava-based outlet 'Poltavshyna', but the overall point is clear: in the Poltava region (and not only), local elites are gearing up for possible local elections next year. There isn't any official plans to hold any elections in 2025, but some politicians are nevertheless anticipating local elections, thinking that authorities may need elections to reassert their legitimacy, while presidential and parliamentary elections will remain impossible under martial law.

This article attempts to “carefully predict the challenges that candidates and voters would face”: the author argues that internally displaced Ukrainians (of which there are around 25,000 in Poltava) could be a new source of ‘administrative resources’—meaning they'll be pushed to vote for the incumbent in exchange for various benefits. Another issue, according to the author, is that “the majority of voters live in constant stress and read regular reports about corrupted officials, so they tend to be angry at authorities, both local and central”. At the same time, the author sees society as both “disorganized and apathetic”. It’s a bit confusing, which I think highlights the main question, one nobody really has an answer for: how will a society that has for three years been fully dedicated to the war effort handle any wartime elections?

Zakhidniy Kurye (in Ukrainian) | "Without mobilization, we will not be able to end this war" | October 8

Interesting interview of the deputy head of the Ivano-Frankivsk region's mobilization center. No actual figures but some valuable details, such as the statement that the number of men who did not update their military information (as required by the new law on mobilization) is “as large” as the number of men who did. Tensions between mobilization officers and the general population also remain high, according to Andriy Moroz: “in most cases, the handing out of mobilization notices is carried out by servicemen who took part in the hostilities and were injured [...] Despite this, they receive rejection, hostile attitudes and violence.”

Zhyttya (in Ukrainian) | 'You're already getting a manicure?' How the 'grief police' treats people who lost relatives during the war | October 14

Difficult testimonies of people who lost relatives in the war—an increasingly common experience—and faced incomprehension, scorn and even rejection. In some cases, this seems to stem from cultural expectations (the need to move on, “you're still young, you can get married again”) or from ritualistic expressions of patriotism that ring hollow in such a situation (such as the use of the popular phrase “heroes never die”). But it is also often caused by the huge gap in experience, something this testimony makes painfully clear: “I became upset when my friends started bragging to me about ‘holding the economic front’ while colleagues at work discussed how much they could pay to send their husbands abroad. They told me 'you're angry just because your husband was killed and you want everyone's husbands to be killed’”

ICYMI

• The Washington Post / Why North Korea is sending soldiers to the Russian front lines

• The New York Times / Political Infighting Hampers Ukraine’s Efforts to Avert Energy Crisis

• The Washington Post / Meet Ukraine’s top fighting unit — at least that’s what its ad says

• The Wall Street Journal / Ukraine Faces Bleak Winter as Russia Ramps Up Assaults, U.S. Support Trickles In

Back in June, I wrote in this newsletter about Karlivka, a small Donbas village I visited three times before and after the invasion that had found itself on the frontline that month. Karlivka was destroyed and captured by Russian forces in late August.

Something to read

OPORA (in Ukrainian) | Demography and migration of Ukrainians | September 18

Ukrainian NGO 'OPORA' released last month this valuable compilation of data about the topic that will, more than almost anything, weigh on Ukraine's future: demography. It looks at population data, border crossings, estimates on the number of Ukrainians living abroad, number of passports issued abroad (almost 900,000 since the beginning of the invasion), birth and death rates as well as data about internally displaced people. One reason it is so valuable to put all these figures in one place is that most of those data points are incredibly unreliable when taken individually (Ukraine's population figure has been famously unclear since long before the Russian invasion), so you pretty much have to compare them to get a real sense of the situation.

This does bring up one major issue with this compilation of data however: OPORA chose to entirely omit United Nations data about Ukrainians in Russia and Belarus—the argument being that those figures are unreliable because they come directly from the Russian and Belarusian states. That may be true, but it's still a significant blind spot.

One thing I'll add is that OPORA has been looking at this topic for some time now, and has in particular focused on the impact of Russian drone and missile attacks on immigration. It published a fascinating report earlier this year that featured the graph below, showing how the first major Russian missile attacks in November 2022 triggered mass flight abroad.

NGL Media (in Ukrainian) | People behind bars | July 30

Lviv-based outlet NGL media analyzed court decisions allowing (or refusing) prisoners to serve in the military. At the time of the story's publication, 3,611 convicts had already been accepted into the ranks of the Ukrainian military since Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law in May—meaning that, two months later, that figure is probably closer or even above 4,000. It is a significant number, about 15% of the country’s convict population. NGL Media points out, however, that more than half of the sign-ups happened in the two weeks following the law’s adoption, with only a hundred people joining in the last week of July.

I recently got the opportunity to talk to a few of these ex-convicts at a training center in Donbas. It was certainly was different than other interviews I’ve done with soldiers: they were younger (the oldest was 43, the others were in their 20s), more cynical but also more eager, having voluntarily joined a unit deployed exclusively for counter-attacks and assault missions, the kind of unit that likely suffer some of the highest casualty rates in the entire military. It also speaks to the current issues with mobilization that NCOs and commanders praised the ex-convicts, saying they were generally a lot more motivated and competent than mobilized troops. "They aren't afraid to fight" one sergeant (who joined up in early 2022) simply said. One of the former prisoners I talked to (a 43 years-old former construction worker, sentenced to five years in jail for theft) also had what is undoubtedly the most interesting call-sign I've come across in the military: 'Koshchei', a villain of Slavic folklore more commonly called “Koshchei the Immortal”.

Vgoru (in Ukrainian) | ‘Askania-Nova' through Russian, rose-colored glasses | September 20

A different look at the Russian occupation of the Kherson region, as Russian film crews and media come to the Askania-Nova natural reserve and attempt to portray it as a peaceful, prosperous area that Russians should definitely visit. There’s a very intentional colonialist flavor to the whole thing, with references to both the Russian empire’s first foray into those lands (where the ‘Novorossiya’ terms come from) and Soviet times: Vgoru’s piece points out how one of the films uses the song “Alouette” by French composer Paul Mauriat, a song well-known in the post-Soviet countries because it was used in the introduction of a popular Soviet wildlife documentary series.

Chytomo (in Ukrainian) | Struggle for Freedom, markers of the nation and Polish swamps of Polissya: new Ukrainian non-fiction | September 6

Five books of non-fiction recommended by Ukrainian literature website Chytomo—I thought it would be interesting for people outside of Ukraine to get a glimpse of the country’s recent literary production. The five books highlighted here are ‘Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature’, ‘The Strength of Resistance. Ukrainians in Soviet camps’ (“25 biographical portraits of former prisoners of Gulag camps and Soviet prisons that inspire, move and make it clear that the power of resistance to the perennial enemy is in Ukrainians' blood”), ‘How to Understand Ukrainians’ (“Maryna Starodubska offers readers a look at ourselves, Ukrainians, and our national culture”), ‘What shall we call this war?’ (“We are at the epicenter of a narrative war—says the preface to the publication—It is also a war for the right to name events and determine their importance.”), and ‘The Lost World of Polissyia. Nature and people of the great marshes’.

ICYMI

Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days

• The Wall Street Journal / Ukraine Loses an Eastern Stronghold as Russia Grinds Forward

• The Associated Press / The fall of Vuhledar is a microcosm of Ukraine’s wartime predicament

• War on the Rocks / (Podcast) The Meaning of Creeping Ukrainian Losses in the East

• The Guardian / ‘Everything is dead’: Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after river poisoning

• Financial Times / Ukrainian energy minister censured over response to power grid attacks

• The Guardian / ‘I want space for jokes’: how film-maker Iryna Tsilyk captures surreal life in Ukraine

• The Washington Post / It was Ukraine’s ‘safe’ city. Then his whole family died.

• Christian Science Monitor / How a front-line husband-and-wife reporting team gets the news out in Ukraine

It has been a very common grievance among soldiers for a while now, with many similar op-eds, Facebook posts or Instagram stories having been published in the past without much fanfare. This time however, Serhiy Hnezdilov, commander of a drone reconnaissance unit in the 56th Mechanized Brigade 'Mariupol', ended his post with a statement: as a protest, he would abandon his post “until clear terms of service have been established or until my 25th birthday, leaving behind me 5 years of impeccable military service.”

The debate about demobilization and the broader issues surround it has been ongoing for a while now (and has been discussed several times in this newsletter, most recently in Ukrainian Pulse #11).

The discussion was in fact a lot more heated a year ago, when families of enlisted troops hoped that a new law on mobilization would include clear terms of service (it has not). Hnezdilov’s post came just as another discussion was picking up—about desertion. Several public statements (there have been more than 80,000 cases of abandonment of post since February 2022, MP Ruslan Horbenko told Novyni Live in early September) as well as the vote of a bill softening punishment for first-time offenders contributed to a more open discussion about what has long been an extremely taboo topic.

Hnezdilov—and many others—argue that desertions are in great part caused by the current inescapable nature of military service, which leaves both mobilized and volunteer soldiers without any way out, save for grave injury or final victory. But the frustration goes beyond that specific topic, Hnezdilov wrote:

In the past 11 years of the war with Russia, our society and our government did not find the strength to seriously and honestly talk about the realities of a protracted, permanent war. We were told that neither side would have enough resources to last a year, that the war would end in two or three weeks. These sweet lies dissipated, but we still ignore reality. We still haven't realized that it is possible to defeat any army, but it is impossible to defeat a nation that is armed and ready for the worst. The authorities wasted precious time, but we still have a chance and an opportunity not only to build a new national security architecture, but also to equalize citizens in terms of rights and responsibilities.

[…]

We are being told that there is no one to replace the infantry that have been bearing the burden of this war. Five million able-bodied men [in the rear] tell soldiers on the frontline that it’s not their war and that they, the soldiers, should remain on that frontline until victory.

Hnezsdilov's statement triggered a nationwide discussion, on social media and beyond (his Facebook post alone was shared at least a thousand times and garnered more than 700 comments). There’s been criticism, mostly muted (of the “the diagnostic is right, but this isn’t the proper way to do this” variety) but also more fierce: one former political activist and current soldier criticized the fact that Hnezsdilov had announced his decision to (effectively) desert while speaking at a civil society event in Kyiv, rather than directly from the trenches—essentially arguing that Hnezsdilov's portrayal of himself as an exhausted grunt is a facade. That specific Facebook post racked up close to 500 comments and was also shared nearly a thousand times, so I do think it’s worth highlighting.

Most reactions have been largely supportive however. Pavlo Kazarine, a Ukrainian journalist who has written a lot on the split between front and rear (and which has been quoted many times in this newsletter) told Ukrainian weekly NV he saw Hnezsdilov's actions as an attempt to “draw the attention of society as well as authorities on the unequal distribution of the burden of war in Ukraine today” (NV’s words, not Kazarin’s) :

“For two and a half years, the war has ceased to be perceived by Ukrainian society as a kind of eschatological threat. And people in the rear learned to live next to the war, learned not to notice it. Among other things, we see this through the low rate of mobilization,” Kazarin noted. In view of this, the entire burden of responsibility associated with the Russian invasion was put on the military personnel. An “internal fence” or even a “trench” is being built between the Ukrainian rear and the military. And this is dangerous.

In that same piece from NV, former MP and current strike drone commander Ihor Lutsenko criticized Hnezsdilov's decision to publicly abandon his post, arguing that this could trigger even more desertion: “Now we even see requests for the creation of a political force made up of people who deserted from the military. This is of course a major threat, and I don’t think Hnezdilov understands the consequence of his actions”.

But Lustenko also wrote a Facebook post on September 23 which doesn’t directly address Hnezsdilov's initiative but nevertheless was pretty clearly written in reaction to it. “Let's honestly admit that there will be no mass demobilization after 36 months of war, because there’s no relief coming” he writes, adding that “the pace of mobilization is barely able to follow the rate of losses”.

Rather, Lustenko advocates six measures he says would increase the relationship between society and the military:

1. Restore legal oversight in the military. Currently, a soldier cannot complain about the arbitrariness of commanders to anyone except higher-level commanders (that is, those who appointed these commanders). This leads to mass desertion.

2. Since we, the current military, will be forced to fight for at least a few more years, a system of rotation between civilian and military life should be introduced. The model can be “3 months at war - 1.5 in civilian life”, or “4 months at war - 2 months in civilian life", etc. This would make it possible to revive families, and in general to partially preserve the civilian life of the military. This would require a larger influx of mobilized troops — but not as large as a full replacement.

3. During the war, remove ranks requirements for appointment to certain positions. […]

4. Create a system to evaluate commanders. It’s a NATO standard if anything, and we urgently need to get rid of inefficient commanders, they are worse than the enemy […].

5. Speed up procedures to allow transfer of personnel. […]

6. Adopt a special status for high-tech branches of the military (drone units, cyber forces, electronic warfare units, etc) similar to the current status of the Special Operations Forces. […]

In other words, the military should stop being a “prison for heroes”, as one soldier aptly put it.