I’ve suspected for months that something was changing in Ukraine. Virtually everyone I had asked since the beginning of the war had maintained that Kyiv could win, with the only acceptable outcome being Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and the Donbas region controlled by Moscow since 2015. But last winter, you could sense a growing uncertainty, and a few of my friends began to whisper about alternative scenarios.
Two recent polls, both conducted before Kyiv’s incursion in Russia’s Kursk region, shed a bright light on these unusually unspoken concerns. One sounding, conducted in May by the Rating Group, found 27 percent of respondents uncertain that Ukraine would succeed in liberating all its lost territory, while 26 percent were willing to negotiate a compromise. Also in May, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found 32 percent—more than triple the number who agreed a year before—willing to give up “some” territory to “achieve peace and preserve [Ukrainian] independence.”
This doesn’t mean Ukrainians are ready to surrender. KIIS project manager Anton Grushetsky cautions against exaggerating his team’s findings. Given the situation on the ground, he argues, Ukrainians remain remarkably resilient. The fighting on the frontline is all but stalemated; Russian missiles bombard Kyiv and other cities every day. More than three-quarters of the country has lost a close friend or relative, and no one is confident of continued Western support. Still, only 32 percent are considering compromise, while more than half—55 percent—are standing firm, insisting that “no circumstances” could justify conceding territory. And now, with the Kursk incursion boosting morale, the stalwarts may be growing stronger.
Philosopher and public intellectual Volodymyr Yermolenko also makes an argument about numbers. Although he is heartened that a majority is still committed to the war, he doesn’t think that’s what matters. “The key question isn’t the majority,” he says. “What you need to win is an active minority—soldiers and the volunteers who help them. And they are not flagging. No soldiers are refusing to continue fighting.”
Beyond the numbers, there’s the issue of how the poll was worded. “The results do not show a desire for peace at any cost,” Grushetsky maintains. “Negotiation is not the same as surrender. People are open to discussion—they aren’t just intent on killing Russians. But they have some red lines.”
One of the most interesting questions on the KIIS survey tried to clarify these public preferences by posing three scenarios. Number one is the most stringent: Ukraine gives up all the territory Russia claims and renounces membership in NATO. Number three is the least demanding: Moscow would keep provisional control of occupied Donbas and Crimea, but Kyiv would retain the currently contested regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia while joining NATO and the European Union.
Not surprisingly, the third scenario is the most popular, and even in that case, 33 percent are dead set against it, while a plurality says a deal would be “difficult but . . . acceptable.”
“Bottom line,” Grushetsky explained, “no one is enthusiastic about negotiating. They’re considering it reluctantly because they feel their choices are narrowing, largely because of uncertainty about continued Western aid.”
One of the red lines that jumped out at me was the distinction, clearly important to many respondents, between allowing Moscow to maintain its hold on Donbas and Crimea and allowing it to overrun the still-contested Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Moscow took de facto control of the southern half of Donbas nearly 10 years ago and has reduced the region, an area about the size of Connecticut, once the most prosperous and productive part of Ukraine, to an economic wasteland. Roughly half the prewar population of 3.8 million fled when the Kremlin’s proxies took over. Warring gangs roamed the streets terrorizing civilians, and good jobs disappeared as Donbas was cut off from the Ukrainian market. Many of its coal mines and metal factories closed their doors forever.
Anton, a sports educator, then a university student studying in the Kyiv region—he asked that I not use his last name to protect his mother still in Donbas—went back to visit his family in 2016. “The city of Donetsk was unrecognizable,” he remembers. “It was as if I’d been gone for 20 years—20 years of decline. Downtown was all boarded up. There were armed men at checkpoints all over the city. There was hardly anything for sale in the stores. I couldn’t consider staying—it was out of the question for me.”
Galina Schaefer, also from Donetsk, now working at an orphanage in the Kyiv region, returned a few years later and found things deteriorating. “It was like going back to my Soviet childhood,” she recalls. “Not just a dysfunctional economy and no opportunity, but people lived in fear. The propaganda was everywhere—blaring in the streetcars and at what passed for malls. And the lies were sinking in. No one was immune, including those in my family who stayed.”
Like many Ukrainians, both displaced easterners are preoccupied now with concerns about Western aid. “Can we rely on Western support?” Schaefer asked rhetorically. “There’s no certainty. People are willing to fight if there’s a chance to win. But if we’re going to lose in the end anyway, let’s stop it now.”
Anton’s triage calculus was equally grim. “We’re weaker than the enemy,” he reasoned. “The West says the right things but is hardly helping, and the situation on the ground is getting worse every day.” The solution he’s considering: “we could freeze the front line where it is now as a way to secure it”—in effect, give up Donbas, at least temporarily, to protect Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
But like most Ukrainians, Anton sees the flaw in this argument: He knows that Moscow is unlikely to be satisfied with just Donbas. According to the recent Rating poll, 86 percent see a medium to high risk that Russia will attack again even with a signed peace treaty, and 91 percent believe that Moscow’s primary motive for negotiating is to gain time to prepare for a new attack. Just as the Kremlin reneged on the Minsk agreements that ended the fighting in Donbas in 2015, Ukrainians are convinced it will ignore any treaty it signs now.
It’s no accident that most polls, including the KIIS survey, show Ukrainians focused increasingly on Western security guarantees—either joining NATO or an alternative agreement with a coalition of willing Western powers that commit to stand with Ukraine if Russia breaches a peace agreement.
“If we give up territory, what will we gain in return?” philosopher Yermolenko asks. “In 1939, when Hitler attacked Poland, he knew he was also attacking Great Britain and France. That’s the kind of guarantee we need.”
A deal along those lines would be wrenching for Ukrainians, but it poses even tougher choices for Americans. Are we ready to stand with Ukraine if Russia attacks again? Are NATO member states willing to commit not just money and weapons but also troops to guarantee a new map of Ukraine? Ukrainians are skeptical—uncertain of the West’s support, but dead sure about Moscow. Any ceasefire agreed to now is only a pause in the fighting.
