Good morning. There’s something insidious about the idea of “Ukraine fatigue”: it could easily lead to the view that what really counts about the Russian invasion is how much interest it excites in the west. In truth, for Ukrainians, resisting the invasion continues to exact a devastating price in the service of an existential cause. While there are no official figures on the toll, an August report estimated 300,000 wounded on both sides, and 190,000 dead.
Nonetheless, it is true that the prospect of some decisive breakthrough routing Russian troops from Ukrainian soil looks more remote than ever. Meanwhile, with another crisis raging in the Middle East, the appetite in western capitals to keep providing the funding and weapons that Kyiv needs has only diminished.
In 2024, the question is whether that loss of momentum means some sort of resolution becomes more likely, or if the war will simply drag on with no clear path to its end.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Shaun Walker, who has reported from Ukraine throughout the year, about how the war has changed, and what might happen next. Here are the headlines.
In depth: ‘Zelenskiy hasn’t found a new way to talk to the world’
When Shaun reflects on the more pessimistic mood that he found in Kyiv on his last visit, he adds some important caveats. “If you look at the scenarios of where the war might have been expected to end up on day one, where we are today would have looked very optimistic,” he said. “There are still plenty of people in Ukraine who believe that they can prevail, given adequate military support from the west.”
And yet, despite a vaunted counteroffensive earlier this year, almost 20% of Ukraine remains under Russian control. Most analysts see the frontlines as now being entrenched in a way that makes a significant breakthrough hard to imagine. “This is the first time since the first days of the war when there hasn’t been much optimism on the horizon,” Shaun said.
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The mood in Kyiv
Writing from Kyiv in November, Shaun described “a subtle yet unmistakable sense of gloom”. That is despite a surreal sense that the capital is relatively insulated from the worst of the conflict, and certainly a far safer place than it was when Russia first invaded.
“It reminds me of being there in 2014/15,” when war was raging in the east after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea but Kyiv felt calm, Shaun said. “This is a much larger scale war, and there are sirens going off all the time; one night during my visit 75 kamikaze drones were fired at Kyiv. But the air defence system is so much more powerful now, and it’s a long time since a drone or missile has landed in the centre of the city. You hear two schools of thought: one that a better life at home is exactly what the soldiers on the front are fighting for, and another that this is a very strange disconnect from reality.”
Either way, the mood has worsened of late. “It started in September, and it has got more pessimistic since. You do hear people say that they don’t believe the war is going to be won in the way they used to believe. Some draw the conclusion that that means you have to fight even harder, and some quietly ask if it means it’s time to think about whether there’s some way to end it.”
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How the military situation has changed
The central reason for that pessimism is a sense that the counteroffensive has been thwarted. While most analysts say that Ukrainian forces adapted to new weapons and training impressively, there were disagreements between Kyiv and the US over whether to concentrate forces in one place or spread them out, to probe for Russian weaknesses. US officials believe that the Ukrainian troops were spread too thinly, and there has been no significant breakthrough.
“There is little sign that either side will make a major advance any time soon,” Shaun said. “Russia has built incredibly dense defensive fortifications which make it almost impossible for Ukraine to advance. But the fortifications also stop the Russians, because they would have to get through the massive minefields they’ve laid. People are fighting and dying every day, but you are seeing horrible battles over small towns of little strategic significance.”
Meanwhile, Russia has considerably ramped up its use of drones to monitor Ukrainian troop movements, and is much better able to respond quickly to any change of approach. And while Putin is able to send an almost limitless number of conscripts to their death without paying any political price, it is getting harder for Ukraine to replace dead, wounded and exhausted troops on the frontline, leading to novel conscription policies and even men being snatched from the street and forced to join up.
There are some pockets of good news for Ukraine, like the establishment of a foothold on the east bank of the river Dnipro that Kyiv says could open a new path to advance towards Crimea. But Shaun said: “It seems very unlikely that we will get the kind of rapid progress that you sometimes had earlier in the war, where you’d wake up and the lines had moved 30 miles overnight.”
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How the world’s attention was diverted
Though it is understandable that the war in Gaza has dominated the headlines and political attention in the west, it brings profound consequences for Ukraine.
“For a long time, there was never a period of more than a couple of days where Ukraine wasn’t at the top of the news agenda,” Shaun said. “But there were already complaints in Ukraine that western focus had begun to fade – the story was becoming less clear cut, and harder to tell in ways that captured people’s attention. And then 7 October happened.”
If news bulletins are less likely to lead on developments in the Donbas than they once were, that may not matter much for Ukrainians in its own right. But a sense that public attention is elsewhere changes the political calculus for leaders in the US and Europe – and arguably contributed to a recent congressional vote that saw Republicans block $50bn in new security assistance to Ukraine. A $250m package this week is scant consolation. Jack Watling’s Observer piece - which points out that the EU has delivered just 300,000 of the 1m shells it promised in March, and that Russia is now firing five times as many artillery shells each day as Ukraine – sets out the severity of the shortfall.
Pentagon officials say that there are enough munitions to last Ukraine for the winter, and Biden could yet get a deal that will secure the money. As an alternative, the US and Europe are reportedly considering drawing on $300bn in frozen Russian assets instead.
If the funding does not come in some form, “that will be catastrophic for Ukraine,” Shaun said. “They are already facing shortages of everything they need.” Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Washington earlier this month, but his pleas for more support appeared to have left Republicans unmoved.
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Hints of internal division
Amid all of this is a growing sense that politics may be returning in Ukraine. “One view you hear is that Zelenskiy (pictured above) has had this superpower of communication, but he’s not the most important guy in the world in the way that he was,” Shaun said. There are whispers that some of his advisers feel he is too bullish about the prospects for progress in the war, and that he has not yet adapted to a changing reality. “He hasn’t quite found a new way to talk to the world, or to his country.”
In theory, there is meant to be a presidential election in March – “but counterintuitively, most observers say that it would not be democratic to hold it. Zelenskiy floated going ahead, but there has been huge opposition, because you can’t have proper elections in wartime, and he would get five more years in a very difficult period.”
It has also been suggested that the head of the army, Valeriy Zaluzhny, could emerge as a rival. “We don’t know if he has political ambitions,” Shaun said. But there is definitely a feeling that he has this huge capital, and that there is a simmering rivalry with Zelenskiy that is mostly going on in private but sometimes spills into the public domain.”
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What happens next
Despite such significant setbacks, Shaun said, “there is still an extraordinary sense among many people that, even if they are exhausted, this is their fight, and they have to fight it.” But without confidence that US support will come through, sheer determination is not enough. And even those who wonder if it may soon be time to seek peace – even at the cost of a vast chunk of Ukrainian territory and leaving millions under Russian occupation – are sceptical that Putin will treat a ceasefire or peace as anything other than a chance to refresh his forces and try again in a couple of years.
“Most people realise that any peace deal Putin would sign – not that he’s said he wants one – would not be worth much without major security guarantees from the west,” Shaun said. “That, above all, is the source of the gloom: this feeling that it is unclear how to keep going, but also unclear how to stop.”
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