Just ask a Ukrainian soldier if he still believes the West will stand by Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” That pledge rings hollow when it’s been four weeks since your artillery unit last had a shell to fire, as one serviceman complained from the front lines.
It’s not just that Ukraine’s forces are running out of ammunition. Western delays over sending aid mean the country is dangerously short of something even harder to supply than shells: the fighting spirit required to win.
Morale among troops is grim, ground down by relentless bombardment, a lack of advanced weapons, and losses on the battlefield. In cities hundreds of miles away from the front, the crowds of young men who lined up to join the army in the war’s early months have disappeared. Nowadays, eligible would-be recruits dodge the draft and spend their afternoons in nightclubs instead. Many have left the country altogether.
As I discovered while reporting from Ukraine over the past month, the picture that emerged from dozens of interviews with political leaders, military officers, and ordinary citizens was one of a country slipping towards disaster.
Even as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine is trying to find a way not to retreat, military officers privately accept that more losses are inevitable this summer. The only question is how bad they will be. Vladimir Putin has arguably never been closer to his goal.
“We know people are flagging and we hear it from regional governors and from the people themselves,” Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff, told POLITICO. Yermak and his boss travel together to “some of the most dangerous places” to rally citizens and soldiers for the fight, he said. “We tell people: ‘Your name will be in the history books.’”
If the tide doesn’t turn soon in this third year of Russia’s invasion, it will be the nation of Ukraine as it currently exists that is consigned to the past.
For a war of such era-defining importance, the scale of Western leaders’ actions to help Kyiv repel Russia’s invaders has fallen far short of their soaring rhetoric. That disappointment has left Ukrainians of all ranks — from the soldiers digging trenches to ministers running the country — weary and irritable.
When POLITICO asked Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba if he felt the West had left Ukraine to fight with one hand tied behind its back, his verdict was clear: “Yes, I do,” he said, in an interview in his office, an hour after another Russian mid-morning missile attack.
Zelenskyy has laid out the stakes even more starkly, saying Ukraine “will lose the war” if the U.S. Congress does not step up and supply aid.
Increasingly it looks as if Putin’s bet that he can grind down Ukrainian resistance and Western support might pay off.
Without a major step-change in the supply of advanced Western weapons and cash, Ukraine won’t be able to liberate the territories Putin’s forces now hold. That will leave Putin free to gnaw on the wounded country in the months or years ahead. Even if Russia can’t finish Ukraine off, a partial victory will leave Kyiv’s hopes of joining the EU and NATO stuck in limbo.
The ramifications of such an outcome will be serious for the world. Putin will claim victory at home, and, emboldened by exposing Western weaknesses, he may reinvigorate his wider imperial ambitions abroad. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are especially fearful they are next on his hit list. China, already an increasingly reliable partner for Moscow, will see few reasons to alter its stance.
Putin’s big target is Ukraine’s second largest city
Right now, Ukraine’s most urgent need is for artillery shells — millions of them. Moreover, Ukraine says it needs at least two dozen Patriot air-defense systems to protect troops on the front lines and to defend Kharkiv, the country’s biggest city after Kyiv, which has been under ferocious missile and artillery attack for weeks.
Fears are growing that Russia may target Ukraine’s second city for a ground offensive soon.
“It’s symbolic because they say that Kharkiv was the first capital of Ukraine. It’s a big target,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with POLITICO’s parent company Axel Springer media outlets last week.
Ukraine’s military is braced for more losses in the coming months. Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander in chief of the armed forces, has warned that the situation on Ukraine’s eastern front has “significantly deteriorated in recent days.” As Zelenskyy himself put it elsewhere, “We are trying to find some way not to retreat.”
