Gloom in Ukraine

Two years after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I was on a night train crossing the country from Dnipro to Chełm in Poland, writing notes and organizing my impressions. I had twenty-four hours of travel ahead of me, so there was plenty of time. Serhii is dead. Iryna is crying. Mila is ok. “Ha ha! He is sunbathing!” (He is dead.)

The front line is more or less where it was at the end of 2022, but the Ukrainians are under severe pressure, and some are convinced that the Russians are about to punch through and capture a lot more territory. In the Black Sea, on the other hand, the Ukrainians have pushed most of the Russian navy from its base in Crimea and broken the naval blockade of their grain exports. In the shadow world of cyber war, where both sides are attempting to steal intelligence and disable each other’s infrastructure, it is hard to assess who has the upper hand. Neither side talks about defeats there unless they are so glaring they cannot be hidden.

Two years ago shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles saved Kyiv, and since then long-range rocket and artillery systems have transformed the battlefield, but now the Ukrainians are desperately short of the munitions—especially shells—promised by their allies. They are also in an arms race with the Russians when it comes to electronic warfare, drones, and drone-jamming technology. All of these are developing with dizzying speed, and the proportion of soldiers killed or injured by drones rather than artillery is rising fast.

In the middle of the war, it is difficult to tie these disparate elements together and come to a meaningful conclusion. After all, from day one the experts, and the Ukrainian public, have been consistently wrong. In the weeks leading up to Russia’s attack, very few Ukrainians could bring themselves to believe that Vladimir Putin was really about to unleash a full-scale invasion. Many experts also doubted this. His build-up on the border was posturing, they said. In fact Putin wanted and still wants to destroy Ukraine as a state and to reclaim what he regards as Russian land. On March 4 Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and now deputy chairman of its Security Council, which is chaired by Putin, gave a lecture in front of a map showing a tiny future Ukraine centered on Kyiv, with most of the rest gobbled up by Russia and parts of the west distributed to Poland, Hungary, and Romania. “One of Ukraine’s former leaders said at some point that Ukraine is not Russia,” said Medvedev. “That concept needs