Ukraine Divided

As we got closer to the front everyone in the car went quiet. Sheriff—the unit commander’s call sign, because he was a police chief before the war—took out a gadget the size of a cigarette packet and stared at its tiny screen. If it flashed a 1, that meant there was a Russian drone a mile and a half away. If it flashed a 2, a drone was half a mile away, and 3 meant you had five seconds, Sheriff explained, “to get out of the car or you are dead.” A few minutes later we were in a forest, close to where Russian troops had seized a small patch of land near Ukraine’s northern border, including half of the destroyed town of Vovchansk.

I had just come from Kyiv. In my hotel I had had a corner room slightly above street level. Every day girls in their twenties came with friends and stood in front of my window and took photos of themselves. Sometimes there were three groups of girls at the same time. Some came with half a dozen different handbags or pairs of shoes, and some had themselves filmed sashaying across the street. At the reception desk the staff just shrugged. The exterior of the hotel had become a fashionable place to take Instagram and TikTok photos, they said, and maybe, when the girls were posing with handbags or shoes, they were modeling them to sell on their Telegram channels.

It made me think that Ukraine has cracked in two. Not in the old sense of east and west, Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking, but rather between Ukrainians who are fighting or participating in the war in some way and those who have checked out of it. For many of the latter, what else are you supposed to do? In just over three months it will have been three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ukraine is not defeated, but Russia is not victorious, either. In the last year the Russians have been advancing, but very slowly, and according to Western intelligence reports they are currently taking an incredible 1,200 casualties a day. Increasingly there is talk of ending the war, but no one knows how, and behind the lines life must go on. You still need to go to work, go to school, or look after the kids.

In Kyiv or Lviv or other places far from the front, it can feel like there is no war or that it is far away and mostly out of mind—but you can never really tell from the visible signs of daily life. Indeed, what passes for the humdrum may simply be what you have to do when real life would otherwise paralyze you. Take Liliya and Sophia, a mother and daughter. They live in Horodok, close to the border with Poland, about as far from any fighting as it is possible to get. Horodok is a bustling and pleasant little city. Liliya, who is in her fifties, does what many here do: she works in Poland, where salaries are far higher. For the last eight years she has gone to Gdańsk on the Baltic coast to manage a restaurant for five months during the tourist season. The money she makes is enough to see her through the entire year. But her husband, Sophia’s father, is fighting in Toretsk, which is now coming under heavy assault from the Russians. Her son Ostap, Sophia’s brother, is also fighting in the east. Every day the two women live under a cloud of dread.

For Sophia, who is thirty-four, a bad news call has already come: her husband has vanished. When he went to war she took over the running of his small business designing and making tombs and tombstones. I said to her that, cruel as it might be, a war must be good for business. It turns out it is not so simple. There are more dead who need a decent memorial, but the war also means most families have less money to spend on one, so in the end the business’s income is about the same. A year ago Sophia’s husband and one of his comrades went out on a mission while fighting in Avdiivka, which fell to the Russians in February, and no one saw what happened to them. She has no idea if her husband was killed or is a prisoner. Every day their four-year-old son asks when his daddy is coming home, and Sophia has to tell him that he is still away on business.

You might think that if there has been no news for so long, he is most likely dead. But that is not certain at all. In September there were 48,138 people—mostly soldiers, some civilians—listed as officially missing by the Ukrainian authorities. The Red Cross has a list of 4,729 Ukrainian POWs held by the Russians, and by debriefing exchanged prisoners, the Ukrainians know of about 1,500 more. Despite this, those people are kept on the missing list. That leaves well over 40,000 unaccounted for, and Ukrainian officials believe that at least half of them could be alive and held captive by the Russians. Why do the Russians not tell the Red Cross how many captives they have and who they are? To torture as many Ukrainian families as possible with the agony of not knowing, as a way of inciting anger at the war and instability. It is not working, but it is still horrible.

I certainly didn’t want to press Sophia on what she thinks and feels at night, when her son is asleep and she is alone, but these days it is not hard to know what some are going through. There is a Facebook page for the families of the missing. Every few hours a new photo and appeal is posted, and the page has almost half a million followers. “I beg you people, do not be indifferent, maybe someone knows something,” writes the wife of Taras Pavlov, who disappeared on the Pokrovsk front. The pain of not knowing is “heart-wrenching,” she says. “I humbly ask for help.”

My last dispatch from here for these pages was titled “Gloom in Ukraine.”^* At that point in the spring, Donald Trump had prevailed upon Republican legislators to block a $60 billion aid package for Kyiv. Things were beginning to look desperate at the front, where soldiers reported that for every ten shells the Russians fired they could only respond with one. In April the aid came through, and the situation eased. Since then there have been high points for the Ukrainians, such as their surprise seizure of territory in Russia’s Kursk region in August, successful drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure and arms depots hundreds of miles away, and continuing success at crippling the Russian navy in the Black Sea.

Yet the prevailing mood is still one of gloom. One reason is that President Joe Biden resolutely refuses to let Ukraine use US-supplied long-range missiles against targets deep in Russia. A second is that significant but unknown numbers of men are dodging conscription, either through bribery or simply hiding or deserting when they get to the front. Desertion and low levels of recruitment are clearly problems for the Russians, too, because thousands of foreigners, lured mostly by good pay, have signed up to fight for them. In October, Ukrainian, South Korean, and American officials said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had decided to send as many as 11,000 of his soldiers to fight for Russia. Still, there are over three times more Russians than Ukrainians, and so, mathematically speaking, Russia has more staying power.

This downbeat atmosphere has led to much discussion of how best to end the war if Ukraine cannot win it. Ukrainian officials say that informal envoys from countries that have been supporting them are suggesting that the time may soon come to sue for peace, or rather for an armistice based on freezing the front lines where they are now, before Ukraine loses more territory. A major factor in determining what happens next, however, is President-elect Donald Trump, who has blamed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s invasion and claimed that he can end the war in twenty-four hours. J.D. Vance, his running mate, has been more specific, saying that the war could end along the current front lines:

Ukraine retains its independent sovereignty, Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine—it doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these allied institutions. That is what the deal is ultimately going to look something like.

In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it. This is what happened in 2015 after Russia grabbed Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, only to come back in 2022 to try to finish the job of destroying Ukraine as a state.

I went to see a friend at the heart of Ukraine’s defense establishment. Normally he is very calm, but for the first time in the more than a decade I have known him, he was angry and raising his voice. Ukraine could not consider any such freeze, he said, before it had security guarantees. This would mean joining NATO or an equivalent. Ukrainians kept asking me why the US was helping to shoot down missiles aimed by Iran at Israel but not doing the same for them. If it did, they said, then everything would be different. The difference, of course, is that, at least for now, Iran is not a nuclear power.

His irritation mounting, my friend said, “We just get a drip, drip, drip of weaponry, enough to keep us alive.” With no prospect of delivering a knockout blow, Russia kept grinding away with a traditional strategy of “attrition and exhaustion,” which it could keep up for “a few more years” thanks to diplomatic and economic support “from China and with military support from North Korea and Tehran.” This was an old-fashioned industrial war like the Franco-Prussian War and the two world wars, and Ukraine needed a better recruitment strategy. It has some four million men eligible for military service, he said, and talk of the country running out of manpower was exaggerated. French soldiers mutinied in 1917, but France was still a victor in the war, he added.

But what would it take to win or at least radically change the situation? Ukraine wanted to repeat the experience of summer and autumn of 2022, he said, when US-supplied HIMARS rocket systems transformed the battlefield. Russian logistics were devastated, allowing the Ukrainians to recapture territory. They could do the same again if the US lifted its veto on the use of long-range missiles inside Russia and supplied hundreds of them to attack the enemy’s military and military-related industrial sites, the majority of which were within range. Without US permission Ukraine could develop its own missiles, which would take months or years depending on the type, but it did not have the capacity to build enough fast enough.

Vladimir Putin has said that if NATO countries permit their weapons to be used against targets in Russia (he does not appear to include Crimea and other territories that Russia has illegally annexed), that would mean NATO is at war with Russia—and then we would be in unknown territory. Most Ukrainians I know think this is a bluff and should be ignored, but there was another theory going around: if President Biden had given a green light for these weapons to be used before the election, then Trump would have accused him of leading the world to the brink of World War III. When Trump says he would bring peace to Ukraine, most Ukrainians interpret that as meaning he would force them to surrender by starving them of arms. As a result, two ideas are circulating among experts and analysts in Ukraine. In 1994 Ukraine gave up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for vague “security assurances” from Russia, the UK, and the US. Now there is discussion of whether it should work on developing nuclear weapons again. Another idea is that foreign countries serious about supporting Ukraine should send troops. This does not mean they would have to fight. They could be deployed to guard the border with Belarus, for example, freeing up Ukrainian troops to go to the front. In the next few months we will see whether these trial balloons pop without consequence or begin to soar.

In the forest near Vovchansk, the unit Sheriff had taken me to see was in a bunker several feet underground. In the distance we could hear artillery. Before driving out we had spent time in Sheriff’s command center. On the surface it seemed like a big, empty, flyblown former factory, but everything took place underground: during Soviet times, big bomb shelters had been constructed here. A couple of men watched live feeds from their sector of the front line on large screens and could order drone attacks on the Russians. This regional center is only one of many and home to one of hundreds of drone units. All their videos and information are fed to a central military system so the top brass can monitor every inch of the front from their headquarters.

There was an air of quiet industry. Among the troops was a team of four who assembled and flew drones. Every day they assembled about ten of them, which cost about $300 each. The soldier in charge of surveillance was a twenty-three-year-old woman whose call sign was Fox, “because I am sly,” she laughed. She had a fox tattoo on her arm. Inside the bunker, Fox, WhatsApping and communicating with colleagues up and down the line, was constantly hunting for new targets. This team thought they killed up to one hundred Russians a week, but they couldn’t be sure. I wondered if she ever thought of those she hunted down along with Migrant, the call sign of her pilot. In my imagination she lay awake at night wondering about the wives, mothers, and children of the men they had killed that day. “No. Why should I? They are on our land. Our task is to kill them.” I asked her and Sheriff and the others if they had a problem with recruitment for their unit of some two hundred soldiers or with desertion, and they said they did not. Fox’s former husband fled abroad to avoid mobilizations, she said with disdain. She was going to punch him out when he came back.

When it was time to go, we made our way back to Sheriff’s big SUV. On the roof were three small metal domes that looked like helmets and another contraption that looked like an inverted flowerpot painted black. They were part of the car’s electronic warfare and jamming system. Every car near the front seemed to have something similar. Sheriff and his comrades only got this system last summer. What was surprising was not how tech was increasingly used along the front but how fast it was flooding in. Today, said Surgeon, who was driving the car and whose call sign derived from his job, well over 50 percent of battlefield casualties are drone-related. Once we were out of the danger zone Sheriff and Surgeon turned on loud rap music. Three weeks later I had a message: Surgeon had been killed at the front.

The next day I sat in the park in Izium with Ostap, close to a giant mural of John Lennon. Izium was occupied in 2022 and then liberated later that year. Ostap is the son of Liliya and the brother of Sophia in Horodok. He told me the same thing as the drone operators near Vovchansk: the Russians were sacrificing huge numbers of men to capture small bits of Ukraine.

Izium lies to the west of the Oskil River. The Russians are pushing here because the river is dammed, so it is wide and would make a defensible line for them. Ostap explained that the Russians were trying to outflank and surround Ukrainian positions. They were constantly probing with small groups of men to find weak points in Ukrainian lines. Like the unit near Vovchansk, his group, part of the Third Assault Brigade, did not have a recruitment or desertion problem. “Our brigade is one of the most effective,” he explained. “We have people applying to join us.” Why, then, are men deserting in one place and actively trying to fight in another? The answer is that military units along the line vary enormously. The main weaponry of all units is supplied by the army, but all of them, including small groups of soldiers, have also developed parallel networks that fund the purchase of drones, vehicles, and specialist equipment such as sniper sights. The Third Assault Brigade is clearly better at this than others. “This war is about logistics,” said Ostap, “and places where you can hide yourself.”

It is not just a matter of equipment. In some units, commanders are trusted, but in others they have a reputation for being reckless with the lives of their soldiers and hence are avoided at all costs. Sheriff told me that if his troops want a break for a few days he tells them to slip away and not to bother with the formalities (and a break might never be approved), because he trusts them to come back. Specialists such as drone operators or artillerymen have a better chance of surviving than basic infantry, for which finding recruits is much harder than for the rest of the military.

Although his unit was staying strong, Ostap was gloomy. He feared that the Russians were on the brink of taking hilly territory south and north of Izium, and if they did, the flat, open country in front of them would be much harder to defend, so they would be able to move much faster than before. In October they were advancing in five different places, and the fear was that while this was slow, one or more major breakthroughs could eventually lead to a collapse of the line.

Since the fall of Avdiivka in February the Russians have been inching ever closer to Pokrovsk, and they are now five miles away from its eastern outskirts. Most of its civilians have fled or been evacuated. Standing by the road were two middle-aged sisters, Olena and Ludmila. They had four shopping bags stuffed with possessions, including some orchids, and were waiting for their ride. The sisters said they had already evacuated to Dnipro but had come back to collect some more stuff. A plume of smoke rose over the town, and buildings by the main road had been shattered. Concrete blocks closed off the main roads into the city. As we were talking Olena burst into tears. She was an accountant, she said, and had always lived in Pokrovsk, but now that she was uprooted at fifty-six, she asked, “How can I start a new life?”

Analysts looking at the map see that if Pokrovsk falls Ukraine will lose a major road and rail junction, and it will be easier for the Russians to take important cities such as Slovyansk and Kramatorsk next, but they mostly fail to see another critical strategic objective. This is a mining region, and in the past few decades one of its biggest mines has been in Udachne, ten miles away. On a Sunday in Udachne there were few people around except for five teenagers hanging out and vaping in the main square by the old Soviet war memorial. It was clear that the mine here, which produces coking coal for what survives of Ukraine’s steel industry, was a target. “They won’t get here!” said fifteen-year-old Vadim with bravado, but in fact the Russians don’t need to capture the mine. In September they killed two women working there with a shell or rocket (the Ukrainians won’t say which), and it is clear that if they can just cut the road taking coal west, they can throttle another part of Ukraine’s economy. Until the full-scale invasion began in 2022 Ukraine produced 21 million tons of steel a year, much of it at two plants in Mariupol that were destroyed when it was lost in May of that year. Last year Ukraine produced 6.2 million tons, but if Udachne cannot continue to supply the remaining steel plants with coking coal, even that will be halved.

When the war began in 2014 and Russia seized most of the Donbas region, Ukraine lost 80 percent of its coal deposits. In October the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, estimated that 6.75 million Ukrainian refugees had fled the country, while more than five million were believed to live under Russian occupation. So Ukraine is losing people while Russia is carving off or destroying parts of its economy and energy system.

Back in Kyiv I met Sergiy Shtepa, a sociology professor. He fought on the front for fifteen months, was injured, and spent six months in the hospital. He could not find the English word to describe his injuries, so he stood, pulled up his trouser leg, and showed me the burn marks. “Society is divided,” he told me. “Maybe half or more of Ukrainians don’t want to fight and think it is not their war.” But how to stop it? “I know why Russia should stop the war,” he said, “but I don’t know why Putin should. He is motivated and for him it is a colonial war and the main objective of his life is the conquest of Ukraine.”

The next day I left for Lviv in western Ukraine. I wanted to see Yevhen Hlibovytsky, who runs the Frontier Institute, a think tank aimed at helping Ukraine plan for the future. As he was on the way to Kyiv we met halfway at a shop that had a couple of tables for coffee behind a curtain. “This is how gangsters used to meet in the 1990s,” he joked. We talked about the idea of freezing the line and how this was sometimes described as a German or Korean solution, in the sense of dividing a country that might eventually be reunited. He scoffed. The difference is that East Germans and North Koreans remained and remain Germans and Koreans. The flight of pro-Ukrainians and the Russification of the remainder of the population in the occupied territories means that there will be no Ukrainians left there, he said, because “anything Ukrainian is wiped out.”

An armistice along the current lines (which Putin has shown no inclination to agree to) in exchange for NATO membership for Ukraine (which he says is out of the question) would also be a “risky offer,” Hlibovytsky said. On the one hand just a promise of membership in the alliance was not enough, because that could be blocked by Putin-friendly governments like those of Hungary or Slovakia, quite apart from the fact that many other countries are far from keen on it. On the other hand, it would mean that Ukraine would not be able to militarily retake its lost territories if it chose to do so, or rather that if it did try, NATO’s security guarantee would not apply. Therefore “we have to think out of the box,” Hlibovytsky said, or Ukraine will either lose the war or achieve a peace that would “cost us tremendously.” His argument was that the world is changing and many Westerners do not understand how tough things are going to get. Western countries have not given Ukraine either enough weaponry or the permission to use it to its full effect, and now, if they try to force Ukraine into accepting a deal with a loss of territory but no full guarantee that they would come to the defense of what remained, this would result in an embittered Ukraine whose people and politicians, or at least those who want to continue to fight, blame the West for everything the country had lost, and “that’s not a good recipe” for a stable and prosperous future.

Putin has started something he has been unable to finish, but Russia has staying power, at least for the foreseeable future. Western leaders do not know how to convince Ukraine to agree to freeze the lines without committing their own troops to defending it, and anti-Ukrainian politicians are gaining ground from Germany to the US. Zelensky wants to force Putin to the negotiating table from a position of strength, but now Ukraine is on the defensive. In the meantime, many Ukrainians no longer wish to fight. As things stand, though, if the fighting stopped tomorrow, both Ukrainians and Russians would immediately begin to prepare for the next round.

—November 6, 2024