Ask any Ukrainian soldier if he believes the West will support Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” That promise sounds hollow when it’s been four weeks since your artillery unit last received a shell to fire, as one soldier from the front line complained in an interview with POLITICO.
It’s not just that Ukrainian troops are running out of ammunition. The delay in Western military aid means the country is dangerously short of something even harder to come by than ammunition: the morale needed to win.
Troops’ morale is grim, sapped by relentless bombing, a shortage of modern weapons and massive casualties on the battlefield. In towns hundreds of miles from the front, the crowds of young men who queued to join the army in the early months of the war have disappeared. Today, those wishing to dodge the draft spend their time in nightclubs, and many men have left the country altogether.
As a POLITICO reporter covering Ukraine over the past month has found out, the picture emerging from dozens of interviews with political leaders, military officers and ordinary citizens is of a country sliding toward disaster.
Even as President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine is trying to find a way not to retreat, the military privately admits that more casualties are inevitable this summer. The only question is how serious they will be.
In recent meetings with POLITICO, the country’s political leaders acknowledged that the public mood is waning, and while they all tried to keep upbeat, frustration with the West was evident in every conversation.
Ukrainian commanders need more soldiers – former top commander Valery Zaluzhny estimated they would need an additional 500,000 troops.
But Zelensky and the Ukrainian parliament are hesitant to announce a new mass conscription. In an interview with POLITICO, Andriy Yermak, the influential head of Ukraine’s Office of the President, gave an important – and perhaps surprising to outsiders – reason for not launching a mass mobilisation: such a draft would not have the support of the people. Zelensky is still “the president of the people,” he said. Yermak added:
“For him [Zelensky], that’s very important, and it’s very important that the people do something not just because they’re ordered to do it.”
Ukraine is admittedly no different from neighbouring European countries, where recent opinion polls show large numbers of people would refuse to be drafted into the army even if their countries were attacked. But Ukraine is a country at war. Such an existential struggle cannot be won without mobilising the entire nation.
And yet, as the conflict continues, Ukrainians living in Kyiv and in the centre and west of the country – far from the front lines – seem in some ways willing to put up with the war raging in the east as long as they can return to their normal lives.
Consequently, there is draft dodging: eligible young recruits find other things to do, congregating in hipster bars and techno clubs closer to evening.
As Ukraine’s deposed supreme commander-in-chief Zaluzhny found out first-hand, rational warnings that things could turn out badly can cause problems for commentators and analysts. But refusing to think critically will not win this war either.
The early surge of patriotic fervour that caused recruiting stations to overflow with volunteers has evaporated. An estimated 650,000 men of draft age have fled their country, most of them smuggled across the border.
Two years ago, trains travelling from Ukraine almost exclusively carried women, children and the elderly seeking asylum. This week, about a third of the passengers on the train in which this correspondent was leaving the country were men of draft age. Somehow, they managed to obtain cancellation papers.
In Zelensky’s presidential office on Bankova Street, his officials insist they remain positive. But that Western aid, especially President Joe Biden’s long-delayed $60 billion support package, can wait no longer.
