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Reasoning that negotiations with Moscow are “politically toxic” to use one reporter’s words, some Ukrainian lawmakers and Western diplomats in Kyiv advocating on the embattled country’s behalf are working under the assumptions that the war can go on for 5 or even 10 years, and that President Zelenskyy’s cannot risk deviating from its stated demands of a return of all territory according to the borders in 1991.
Isabelle Khurshudyan reporting for the Washington Post from Kyiv claims the war is a “grinding stalemate” but that’s hardly likely. In February, Russian forces captured all of the territory surrounding Avdiivka, a critical city that secured all of the Donbas region consisting of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Officials Khurshudyan spoke with seem to think that neither a ceasefire nor outright peace negotiations are acceptable to the Kyiv elite, who nevertheless have very few options left on the table.
According to the Post, negotiations in Kyiv over the recent passage of the mobilization act that would lower the conscription age to 25 down from 27, involved over one thousand amendments, based mostly on the legislation’s unpopularity. Documentary filmmaker David Holthouse recently returned from Ukraine where he working, and told the Joe Rogan Experience that youth nightlife is very much alive in the western half of the country, something officials speaking with the Post confirmed as presenting a risk to solidarity, as exhausted soldiers returning from the front risk see the younger generation enjoying themselves and create ” social tensions”.
The initial war months saw hundreds of thousands of volunteers sign up for service, but that fervor has nearly all been drained out of the Ukrainian people, and the average age of the soldiers on the front line is 43 years.
“Ukraine does not have the power to make another offensive,” one Western ambassador told the Post. “There are two scenarios. One scenario is they get the support to maintain defensive lines… The second is there is not enough support and Ukraine will defend itself anyway, desperately and with less manpower”.
Just the two options
In the closing days of World War II, during the Allied advance into Germany and the surrounding of the Japanese home islands, the mood among the defenders was apocalyptic, with Japanese military staff routinely expecting every last man, woman, and child to be killed before Japan surrendered. This was famously reported by the Japanese hold-out Hiro Onoda, who hid in the jungles of the Philippines until the 1970s. Attempts by the Japanese government to draw him out failed, because in Hiro’s mind, if Japan had lost the war, “there shouldn’t be a Japan” left to go back to.
In Germany, this was metastasized into the orders to create the Volkssturm, an apocalyptically fanatic militia, and the famous “Nero Decree” in which Hitler prepared a scorched earth plan of massive proportions that called for the destruction of any infrastructure that could be used to aid the Allied advance, and included a program that would have turned Paris into a smoldering moonscape.
The Volkssturm never reached the 6 million-man size that Hitler imagined it would, but, subject to the most intense propaganda efforts, many of the units were indeed fanatics and routinely carried out capital punishment on less-fanatical German citizens who weren’t willing to fight to the death.
As far as the Nero Decree went, the Führer’s wishes were disobeyed by the arms minister of the Third Reich, Albert Dreer, who realized Hitler was insane.
It’s wild to suggest that Kyiv has arrived at that point, but some of the steps they are taking in the face of Russia’s resolute and brutal attacks, and some of the language officials are using, blaze a clear path to this sort of scorched earth mentality.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, a professor at the Kyiv School of Economics and former government minister, told Khurshudyan that “no one challenges” the idea that the war might last for a decade. That’s an assessment close to insanity when some front-line artillery units are operating on 2 to 5 shells per day.
“Look, we have been without ammunition for half a year already. Not enough of it, at least,” said a senior Ukrainian official, unauthorized to speak with the press. “Well okay, it will get worse. And so what? What other options are there?”
The Western ambassador who said that Ukraine’s two options are to fight with aid or fight without aid added later that Ukraine and her allies need to imagine 2025 as “another year of war, not peace talks”.
WaL reported in March that Lithuanian intelligence services believe that Putin and Russia have enough resources to continue fighting at this red-hot intensity for another 2 years, so perhaps even that assessment of 2025 is naively optimistic.
Like the Volksstrum’s mythical 6 million man figure which it got nowhere near amassing, the mobilization of 500,000 conscripts expected if Zelenskyy lowered the draft age is now considered an overcount following a personnel audit, the Post reports. Manpower shortages have plagued the Ukrainian defense forces since the end of the 2023 summer counteroffensive, and one might expect that even if the army tried to draft so many, the same problems of corruption, draft-dodging, bribery, and flight through the forests across the border to Romania would follow.
“Nobody wants to really bear the responsibility at this point,” said a second Western diplomat, referring to the unpopularity of the mobilization law. “But it will have to be done”.
“Have to be done”—”And so what? What other options are there”—”…another year of war, not peace talks”—”Ukraine will defend itself anyway”—these are the quotes of a political atmosphere in which a political objective is fast becoming seen as worth more than the nation in which it was conceived. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: Ukrainians honoring fallen soldiers at a memorial wall. PC: Υπουργείο Εξωτερικών. CC 2.0.
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