By Hugh Barnes
ON Truth Social, his alt-right media platform, and in any number of rambling speeches, the wannabe Nobel peace laureate Donald Trump likes to claim that he’s on the verge of brokering a ceasefire in Ukraine. But that’s not the way it looks to tens of thousands of war-weary Ukrainian soldiers braving a cold winter on the frontline.
The view from the battlefield presages no end in sight. Quite the opposite in fact. ‘Armageddon is coming,’ I heard Denys, a 38-year-old sergeant in charge of a drone unit, tell his wife Sofia on a video call. He was sitting in a tiny basement, with access to the internet via Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite, approximately five miles back from the ‘kill-zone’, as it’s called, in Zaporizhzhia, southeast Ukraine. ‘Fuck Trump,” he added, with a wry smile. ‘And Musk too.’
US policy has shifted wildly over the course of the war’s four years. Under Joe Biden, the White House mantra was ‘as long as it takes’. Unfortunately Biden himself didn’t last the course. And by the time Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up at the Oval Office a year ago, Trump was singing from a different song sheet. ‘You don’t have the cards,’ the newly-installed US Commander-in-Chief told Zelensky bluntly during a televised row that made headlines around the world.
Yet in spite of this diplomatic volatility, the reality of the conflict on the ground has been more or less stalemated since Ukraine’s forces took back Kherson and lost Bakhmut a year into the war. By then, the ubiquity of drones had already changed Russian tactics, eliminating the old-fashioned tank attacks that had proved so disastrous during the abortive siege of Kyiv in the early spring of 2022.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin apparently believes that he can now prolong the aerial bombardment long enough to convince Kyiv’s western backers that it’s pointless trying to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Irrespective of the cards he’s been dealt by Putin and Trump, Zelensky is playing a risky game of poker but his strategy is quite clear: to hold out for security guarantees from the United States and Nato so that a peace deal does not just give Putin enough breathing space to re-group and re-arm before attacking Ukraine again.
Dangerous illusions
In December, reports emerged of a 28-point peace plan shepherded into existence by Trump’s envoy and old friend Steve Witkoff. The plan called for Ukraine to withdraw entirely from the Donbas, parts of which it still controls, to give up the prospect of joining Nato — which is a dangerous illusion anyway — and for Nato to agree not to send troops there. No doubt Putin viewed the original 28 points as an opening gambit anyway, a basis from which he could bamboozle Trump and Witkoff, a real estate developer with no prior experience of international affairs, in order to push Russia’s advantage.
Zelensky and his war cabinet have been more willing to make concessions than many observers realise. And there is a logic to this readiness to negotiate, insofar as Ukraine’s situation on the battlefield is problematic and likely to get worse.
Ukraine’s armed forces lack sufficient numbers of combat-ready infantry and morale is low due to long deployments caused by the lack of reserves. A record number of 22,000 troops went absent without leave from the army in December. Another complaint across the military is the shortage of equipment, apart from drones, which are unable to beat back the Russian onslaught single-handedly.
At the same time, a corruption scandal has unfolded in Kyiv in which several top officials, including a longtime Zelensky confidant with interests in the energy and drone sectors, were implicated in a $100-million kickback scheme. The political crisis ended the reign of Zelensky’s chief of staff and brother-in-arms Andriy Yermak and shook public confidence in Ukraine’s leadership. But now Zelensky is betting that a sweeping overhaul of the state apparatus — and the promotion of one of his main rivals, the former military spymaster Kyrylo Budanov as chief of staff — will ‘make Ukraine more resilient’. In the meantime, the war is likely to drag on.
Wasted years
The aforementioned ubiquity of drones often leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict in Ukraine because a crucial role is still played by ground troops who are tasked with infiltrating or holding positions under aerial cover from drone units led by Denys and other hi-tech specialists operating as many as 20 miles back from the frontline.
I met one of these infantrymen, a 32-year-old battalion commander by the name of Kostyantyn, on the southern front. He wasn’t a professional soldier. He had worked as a delivery driver in Dnipro before he volunteered in 2022. But sitting in a deep well-protected trench amid the sprawl of military debris and personal items — no Starlink internet connections here — he somehow embodied the weary but defiant spirit of the Ukraine nation.
‘Of course I don’t want the war to go on and on,’ Kostyantyn said. ‘Nobody does. We’ve all made too many sacrifices, and lost too many friends, too many loved ones. We’ve also lost too many years of our lives defending our country from these invaders. But at the same time, however exhausted we may be feeling right now, we don’t want to surrender our land, because that would mean that all our sacrifices, all our heartbreak, all those wasted years, had been for nothing.’
Photo by Jorgen Haland/Unsplash
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