When 11th grader Kostia thinks about his fellow Ukrainians’ will to keep fighting back against Russia, his mind goes to the final dance at his school last year.
Teachers were looking for 10th grade boys as fill-ins to accompany the graduating 11th grade girls to the dance. The older boys had taken their final exams, he explains, “and their parents made them leave the country as soon as possible before they turned 18” to avoid wartime rules, then in place, that prevented men age 18 and older from leaving the country.
“This illustrated for me that not many see their future in Ukraine,” says Kostia, who asked that only his first name be used.
Why We Wrote This
Heavily outgunned, Ukraine has kept Russia at bay through more than 3 1/2 years of war. But stepped-up Russian strikes against cities and relentless advances in battle are proving a challenge for exhausted Ukrainian civilians and soldiers alike.
While Kostia, at 16, is still too young for front-line duty, he is inspired by videos of combat drones attacking Russian soldiers and positions, and has taken military courses in drone-flying and engineering.
“From what I see among my peers, among people of my age, a lot of youth just don’t care about this country – they don’t want to be really involved,” he says at a drone practice session in a Bucha gymnasium, northwest of Kyiv.
“It’s not only about serving in the army,” he adds, “but basically not seeing their future in the country.”
Kostia’s skeptical voice is just one point on a wide spectrum of emotions being expressed these days in Ukraine. After more than 3 1/2 years of what has become the most lethal war in Europe since World War II, exhausted civilians and worn-down soldiers are struggling to maintain high levels of motivation to confront home-front and front-line crises, with no end in sight.
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Russia has stepped up the bombardment of cities and energy infrastructure across Ukraine as never before, sometimes with hundreds of drones and missiles each night.
Heavily outgunned and outnumbered by Russia from the start, Ukraine has nevertheless kept Moscow’s onslaught at bay, with extensive military and cash support from the United States and Europe – and, increasingly, its own creative innovations on the battlefield, from drones to deep strikes inside Russia.
But there is little good news these days from the 800-mile front line, with Russian forces now occupying some 20% of Ukraine and making daily incremental advances. In the most significant gain by Russia since 2024, the eastern city of Pokrovsk is now being absorbed by Russian infantry units after an 18-month campaign.
Indeed, Ukrainian defense chiefs confirm the recent withdrawal from five settlements, including late Tuesday from the town of Rivnopillia, in the Zaporizhzhia region, to more “defensible positions.” The Russian advance has taken advantage of fog and bad weather that disrupt effective drone use.
Ukrainians’ resilience is further tested by diminished U.S. military support and by suggestions by President Donald Trump that any peace deal will require giving up land to the Russian invaders.
Recalling darker times
Ukrainians feel the strain everywhere, from the school dance floor in Bucha to an underground dugout position west of the Pokrovsk front line. It’s there that drone platoon commander Dmytro Sadovets recently piloted a Ukrainian-made Gor reconnaissance drone over Russian lines.
As Mr. Sadovets’ platoon calls in coordinates for Ukrainian drone and artillery strikes, the Russian targets are plentiful. But that’s the easy part.
What is also on his mind is the slackening motivation he notices among his fellow citizens on matters large and small.
“I see things optimistically [because] we are able to unite the world around us, to get this support at a very critical moment,” says Mr. Sadovets. “There is a consensus about this war, and if you look in our [Ukrainian] history, deep in our history, we had much, much darker periods of time, and still we survived.”
He notes, for example, the deliberate famine imposed on Ukrainians by Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Known as the Holodomor, which translates as “extermination by hunger,” the tactics included Stalin’s NKVD secret police going from door to door to confiscate all food from every household. An estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians died.
“They were using spikes to poke through the ground, to look for hidden food stores, and when you hear this story from relatives in your own family, it hits differently,” says Mr. Sadovets. He recalls his grandmother’s girlhood memories of those most affected by the famine, and “how they felt, how they looked; it was horrible.”
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“Everyone in Ukraine knew about it, but [foreign] journalists were not coming and not talking about that, so no one cared, and these terrible things just went on,” says Mr. Sadovets. The contrast with today could not be more distinct, though he says that point is often lost.
“When I hear about civilians complaining that they are exhausted … and this war is so terrible for them, while they are living their lives, I just want them to look in the history books [to] the really dark times, when no one was around, and no one cared what happened,” he says.
Civilians’ support “is lacking now”
“At the beginning of the war, I remember seeing [Ukrainians] making camouflage nets, and also a lot of Molotov cocktails,” recalls Mr. Sadovets. “None of those things were really very useful on the front line, but when soldiers saw that unity and activity, and willingness to help, that really motivated them.”
“That was the factor that helped us stand at that point, and that is what is lacking now,” he says. “We miss this.”
Within weeks of that conversation, Mr. Sadovets and his drone platoon from the 148th Separate Artillery Brigade were forced to withdraw, as Russian forces occupied the area.
Also feeling a broader drop in morale are drone pilots of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, working toward the northeast, where the town of Kostiantynivka is surrounded on three sides by Russian forces.
“The thing about morale, it always tends to fall with time and exhaustion – if we don’t receive an impulse of motivation from society, from the government,” says Bohdan, a drone pilot and temporary platoon commander with the call sign “Bandera,” speaking at a position in Druzhkivka.
Military units have had to step in to boost morale amid flagging civilian support, he says.
“I remember going to these cities in the rear, like Lviv. People would come to you on the street and just say, ‘Thank you,’” says Bohdan. “Now … they try to avert their eyes.”
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At the same time, Russian influence campaigns range from constantly striking energy infrastructure as winter looms – the most expansive of the war coming last Saturday – to trying to instill a sense of inevitable Ukrainian defeat.
“Russia deliberately, very accurately, very professionally, works on painful points in Ukrainian society,” says Yevhen, a veteran officer since 2019 of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade who asked that his last name not be used. “This is like a parallel war.”
Russians motivating their own
Such Russian efforts also aim at their own soldiers, says a veteran Ukrainian artillery unit commander-turned-drone-intelligence officer, who asked not to be further identified.
“I see a huge amount of motivation from the Russian side, and a very well-organized movement going on,” he says. “Of course, there are a lot of TikTok videos of Russians blaming their commanders. [But] Russian propaganda is working.
“They are now on the move; they are capturing new territory. So even if they capture the smallest … village, you can see on their Telegram channels it’s like a huge victory. They’re all celebrating,” he says.
“The Ukrainian army has good motivation, but we see a problem with motivation at the rear, with civilians, [partly] because they listen to Russian propaganda, which is very good,” says the officer.
“Even Napoleon said that if you have three newspapers, you can defeat an army of 100,000,” he says. “We know what we are fighting for – our families and our children. We don’t want these [Russians] to be here. Of course, we are more tired than 2022, but there is no problem with motivation in the Ukrainian army. We fight, and we know what we are fighting for.”
Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.
