Close to the frontline in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, a bumpy road passes through half-abandoned hamlets. It morphs into a muddy track, snakes through fields, and eventually leads to an army base hidden in a forest.
There, as a kettle boiled on a gas heater, a weary 39-year-old soldier, who wished to be known only by his callsign, Titushko, spoke about the problems of fighting the Russians amid a serious ammunition shortage, as the sound of fire from nearby positions echoed around the base.
In November, Titushko’s men, part of an artillery division in Ukraine’s First Tank Brigade, received a supply of about 300 shells every 10 days, but they now have a firing limit of just 10 a day. “Back then, we could keep them on their toes, fire all the time, aim every time we saw a target. Now we fire exclusively for defence,” he said.
The ammunition reserves at the base are thin, and partly made up of Iranian shells – part of a shipment seized in the Gulf apparently en route to Houthi rebels in Yemen. They are “extremely problematic and don’t work well,” another soldier at the base said.
Along the frontline, Ukraine is on the defensive, short of ammunition and soldiers. On Saturday, Ukraine’s military command announced it was withdrawing from Avdiivka, further east in Donetsk region, handing Russia its first major territorial gain since May last year. Ukrainian officials have described the loss as a direct consequence of the shortage of ammunition from the west.
The grim news, as the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches, is another sign that the third year of the war could be the hardest yet for Ukraine. The mood is very different from that of a year ago, when amid the horror Ukrainians remained buoyed up by the extraordinary consolidation of national society, and looked forward to the swift liberation of all territories occupied by Russia.
In Kyiv, the cultural historian Natalia Kryvda attributed the remarkable coming-together in the first year of the war to Ukraine’s past as a nation that lacked the infrastructure of a state. “Because we have this long history of a stateless nation, we organised these horizontal links to start the defence. People took responsibility, they didn’t wait for orders,” she said.
Those first months saw almost all segments of society unite, said Kryvda, creating a powerful new Ukrainian identity and a pride in being Ukrainian after years of denigration of the concept from Russia. “It was something very beautiful, but I’m worried that this unity is starting to crack now,” she said.
On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reminded the Munich security conference of just how much Ukrainian society had achieved over the past two years: “Ukrainians have been holding [out] for 724 days – 724 days, would you have believed 725 days ago that this was even possible?”
But with casualties mounting, army ranks and artillery supplies depleted and US financial aid stalled – and with the potentially devastating prospect of a Donald Trump presidency on the horizon – Ukrainians greet the second anniversary with trepidation about what the future might hold, as well as with increasingly visible divisions in society.
At the base in Donetsk region, Titushko talked about the unease he felt on his recent two-week home leave. In peacetime, he worked as a combine harvester driver in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, before he signed up to fight in the first days after the invasion, in February 2022. He spent half of January this year back at home – his first break from the front for more than a year, giving much-needed respite from the nightly artillery and air attacks, the winter cold, and the giant rats that make life in the trenches hard to bear.
But instead of finding the experience rejuvenating, Titushko found the sight of civilians enjoying a semblance of normal life in cafes and restaurants difficult to stomach, and the questions they asked when they saw his uniform to be irritating.
“They ask you stupid things. ‘What’s it like there? How many Russians have you killed? How many of ours are dead?’” he said. He looked around at life back home, and wondered why the men he saw on the streets were not with him, at the front.
“I don’t really understand it. There’s enough work here, even if you don’t want to be firing a gun. You could dig a trench, cook the meals. Everyone helped at the start, everyone cared, but now it’s a different time. You look at these people and you want to say, ‘What will you do if the Russians come back and come to your towns? Do you think they’re going to be handing out Chupa Chups?’”
At this stage of the war, finding people who will go willingly to fight is becoming ever harder. It was one thing to sign up when it seemed like the Ukrainian army might advance and retake all the lost territory swiftly and triumphantly. Now, the calculation looks different.
Kyiv has been mobilising men for the war effort constantly over the past year, and there are plans to add hundreds of thousands more over the next year. Some are willing to go if called on, but many more stay in hiding at home for fear of receiving a summons in the street, or try to escape the country.
“Mobilisation is unpopular in society. The self-preservation instinct, the understanding that the war is going to drag on – nobody wants to risk the lives of their close ones,” said the Kyiv-based political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko. “On the other hand, there is no doubt that we need mobilisation, so it’s a difficult situation.”
He said he expected the authorities to solve the problem on a month-to-month basis, rather than by mobilising a large number of people at once. “The resources to call up half a million people at once simply aren’t there, plus it would hit the economy hard, and there’s already a problem with labour reserves,” he said.
There is also the question of how well newly mobilised soldiers can fight. An army source said plans were under way to increase the training period from one month to two, but this is still not long to prepare for trench warfare. “It’s more a question of psychological problems than skills,” said Valentyn, the deputy commander of the artillery division. “People from civilian life have no experience of being at the front, of being away from home and loved ones for so long.”
Millions of Ukrainians who are not fighting still help the war effort with volunteer work or donations, but the divide between people who have had very different experiences over the past two years is growing more notable.
Anastasiia Shuba, a lawyer who sits on the defence ministry’s anti-corruption council – and who frequently travels to the front as a volunteer to bring supplies to troops and visit her husband, a commanding officer in the east – said she had cut off contact with friends who seemed indifferent to the war effort. After visits to the frontline, she finds the contrast in Kyiv – where, despite frequent Russian missile attacks, shops and restaurants are open and the streets are bustling – to be jarring.
“My husband says to me: ‘We are here exactly so you can all live normally.’ He tells me to go shopping, to go on holiday to the sea with our son,” she said. “But it’s hard. Of course not everyone can fight or volunteer, and we need a functioning economy. But when your country is in such a difficult situation, only a parasite would go on living without thinking how to help.”
She added, however, that she refused to buy into the prevailing pessimism about the direction of the war. “If you believed everything you read on TikTok and Instagram, then the only option would be to cover yourself in a blanket and crawl to the cemetery. Being pessimistic just burns up so much energy, and I could use that energy for useful things instead. If I really start to believe that we’ll lose, then I will collapse and won’t be able to get up again.”
There are certainly some bright spots amid the gloom – Ukraine’s recent military dominance of the Black Sea, despite not having a navy, and its audacious special operations behind Russian lines, as well as the massive ramping-up of domestic drone production, which has played a key role in the fighting.
But the international backdrop makes it hard to be confident about longer-term prospects for liberating territory. The EU finally overcame opposition from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and ratified a €50bn funding package, but a huge US package is still stalled. Even if it passes, Trump is likely to change the tone of the debate just by becoming the Republican nominee, let alone the president.
In the third year of the war, the domestic political scene may also fracture. The unity of the first year has been steadily dissolving over recent months, with political opponents of Zelenskiy becoming increasingly vocal and a sense that politics has returned. The fatigue so visible in society is also palpable in the corridors of power. “Everyone is exhausted, physically and emotionally. Everyone’s fuse is very short,” said one diplomat based in Kyiv, of conversations with political leaders.
Ordinarily, a presidential election would have been due this spring, though there is a broad consensus that holding one at the moment is impossible. But there is concern that Zelenskiy has not found a new way of ruling after the initial period of consolidation, in order to bring more people into the tent.
“There are only two people who make decisions in this country,” said another diplomat, referring to Zelenskiy and his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.
The dismissal of army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi earlier this month was widely seen as being at least partly motivated by Zaluzhnyi’s high popularity ratings. The change has passed without significant protest for now, with most Ukrainians understanding that internal turmoil would only play into Russia’s hands, but many see Zaluzhnyi as a potential future challenger to Zelenskiy.
As the 24 February anniversary approaches, Zelenskiy’s team will be keen to remind western leaders of those first days of the war, when Russian troops bore down on Kyiv and many in the west assumed Ukraine’s days as an independent state were numbered. Despite the slow western response, Ukraine stood firm, and few now believe Russia has the capability to launch a renewed assault on the capital.
On a breezy recent morning not far from Ukraine’s border with Belarus, digger trucks clawed muddy earth from the ground, and a group of men toiled with spades, working to add to a network of sturdy trenches and concrete fortifications as part of a formidable new defensive line.
Two years ago, columns of Russian armour sped through this area meeting little resistance as they headed towards Kyiv. “There were a few guys with Javelins [anti-tank missiles] at the border but otherwise they just went straight through,” said Oleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier working on the fortifications. “That won’t happen again.”
Total defeat for Ukraine now looks like an impossible dream for Vladimir Putin, but total victory – including the reclaiming of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 – is also harder to imagine in the near term. Negotiations with Russia have long been a taboo subject, mainly because nobody believes Moscow would keep any agreement and would simply use it as a pause for breath before pushing again.
But fighting on indefinitely is also hardly sustainable. “If we can survive the next year, then we will probably be forced to negotiate some kind of ceasefire,” said Fesenko.
For many at the front, agreeing to a fragile and imperfect peace would be an unthinkable concession after the efforts and losses of the last two years. At the frontline, Titushko said the thought of returning home to peaceful life once more, only to be called up again when Russia recommenced hostilities, was too much to bear. “In 2014, we thought it was over and they came back. This time we have to finish them off for good,” he said.
