Three years since Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukraine’s growing war fatigue groans from cities and villages subjected to daily bombardment, rolling blackouts, and grim news from the front lines.
Far from the front, at an artists café in Lviv, Oleksandr grows visibly more stressed with every word he speaks about the depth of his exhaustion.
His mind is at “1% charge, and it’s not charging. It’s like a broken battery,” says Oleksandr, who hails from Sieverodonetsk, a city in Ukraine’s industrial far east that fell to Russian forces within months of the invasion. (Like some others interviewed, Oleksandr gave only one name.)
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If Russia’s plan to quickly defeat Ukraine failed, its fallback seemed more assured: a war of attrition in which the larger and stronger nation would prevail. With Western help, Ukraine has endured, but fatigue is setting in just as U.S. support is flagging.
“We see the rhetoric of [U.S. President Donald] Trump and some others, saying, ‘You need to negotiate,’” he says. “Russians say they are ready to talk, but they don’t care about this. They need to destroy Ukraine. … It’s simple.
“All this is very depressing; that’s why people are tired.”
But then the young artist catches himself, and puts his depression – and the nation’s fatigue – into a broader context. As a student in the relative safety of Lviv, he has little right to be exhausted, he says, compared with soldiers in ice- and mud-bound trenches.
“When you hear this phrase, ‘Ukrainians are tired of war,’ it is information warfare, because for Russians, it is important to create the impression that Ukrainians will not continue to fight, that we will not resist,” Oleksandr says.
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Until now, the United States and European countries have spearheaded efforts to enable Ukraine to push Russian forces out. But their tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and financial aid have shown mixed results. Russia now occupies some 20% of Ukraine’s territory.
“Nobody wants to give up territory and the people who are now under occupation,” Oleksandr adds.
Yet Ukraine’s narrowing options came into sharp focus Feb. 12, when President Trump announced that during a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he had started negotiations with Russia to end the war.
The phone call put an end to Washington’s three-year refusal to deal with Mr. Putin – the target of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes. Mr. Trump said the two had discussed the “great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”
The same day, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appeared to endorse two key Russian demands. He told a gathering of Ukraine allies in Brussels that it was “unrealistic” for the country to envision restoring its 2014 borders or joining the NATO alliance.
Ukrainians voice concern that any White House plan will simply freeze the conflict, after they expended so much blood and treasure to regain their land.
A shift in opinion
A poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found last December that 38% of Ukrainians are ready to make territorial concessions in exchange for peace, up from 32% in October. Yet it also found that 51% of Ukrainians rejected the idea of giving up any land to Russia, ever.
Maria Avdeeva, a security analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says she has noted a “very clear shift” in public opinion over the past year. While Ukrainians still define victory as recapturing all the country’s land, she says, many now believe that this will not be possible in the short term.
“It’s not that Ukraine is ready to give up territory to Russia,” says Ms. Avdeeva. “But more people are ready to say, ‘OK, we stop now and get more resources, get more prepared, and then get back what is ours.’”
Addressing the issue of fatigue, she recalls that early in the war, Ukrainians had “hope that we would be able to end the war soon.”
“It would have been very difficult to fight as hard if people had known the war would last for years,” she says.
Yet today Ukrainians are still pushing back, in ways large and small.
In Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, for example, less than 20 miles from the Russian border and subjected to frequent attack, a new apartment block rises defiantly amid the ruins of the Saltivka District.
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“This project brings me a lot of joy; I’m very happy,” says Nelly Kazanzhieva, head of the district administration, breathing in the strong scent of fresh paint in the near-finished building – one of 24 rebuilt in 2024.
“I can imagine when they clean this place, and put up paintings and flowers, it will be beautiful,” Ms. Kazanzhieva says over the sound of distant artillery. “We love Ukraine and love our city. People should not be left without hope.”
Debate in the trenches
For the Ukrainian crews of U.S.-made Stryker fighting vehicles, dug deeply into the frozen front line, the question of whether and how to carry on is hotly debated.
“If the U.S. stops supplies, we are [in trouble],” says Mykola Onyschenko, a Stryker gunner. “It is better to stop the war – we are tired; we want to go home finally, after three years.”
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Retorts driver Marin Bruzha, in the same bunker, “It’s not a good idea, because what else are we fighting for, if not for our land?”
“I don’t think we have enough arms, resources, and human power to recover our territory occupied by Russians,” replies Mr. Onyschenko. “It’s just not possible now.”
The continuing cost is clear in Bohodukhiv, where a woman stands before a memorial to dozens of fallen soldiers, tenderly stroking one portrait.
“I am upset – at this point I am not sure why my husband gave his life,” says Olena Panchenko. Her husband, Serhii Oksenych, was conscripted last July and sent to the front with little training.
Russia “can take Donbas; I have never been to Crimea,” says Ms. Panchenko. “I don’t care. Just stop people dying.”
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“We are still here”
The high price of resistance is also obvious in Ukraine’s cemeteries, where blue-and-yellow flags mark soldiers’ graves.
“Every Sunday we have a funeral. A lot of young guys are dying,” says municipal worker Volodymyr, whose team tends a frigid, windblown cemetery in Pyriatyn, east of Kyiv. “Every day it is getting harder and harder.”
Still, many Ukrainians are proud of how they have survived since February 2022, when many in the West – and many Ukrainians – expected a swift Russian victory.
“Every time I say people are exhausted … I see something like a missile hit, and see how people are reacting,” says Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian member of parliament: “People coming together as one.”
“No matter how hard everyday life, and no matter how hard the news that we are receiving, we have not fallen. We are still fighting every day,” says Ms. Rudik.
No matter the dark mood, she says, “We are still here.”
Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.
