Linda Kinstler
On December 1, a group of prominent Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians published a manifesto in Ukrainska Pravda about how the war might end. “It is difficult to speak of victory,” it begins, “when the enemy is mounting unprecedented and at times successful ground attacks.” Already in August, when the group started drafting the text, Ukraine’s military was understaffed; new recruits were increasingly hard to come by, pushing the government to resort to violent tactics in its search of draft dodgers and deserters; and the Trump administration’s shifting policies were imperiling the army’s access to funding and weaponry. These trends have persisted in the months since. The head of the armed forces of Ukraine reported last week that the army is currently seeing its highest daily volume of clashes with Russian soldiers since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.
Though the frontline has remained mostly static, the Russians continue their attempts to press forward on the battlefield and the Ukrainian public is growing weary of war. Whatever the terms of an eventual peace deal—if such a deal materializes at all—they will bring profound losses for Kyiv, its aspirations for NATO membership and the restoration of its occupied territories almost certainly among them. The manifesto aimed to give Ukrainians a vocabulary they could use to imagine this situation as anything other than a kind of defeat—a necessity, the authors believe, if the public is to accept what one MP recently called a “bad, or very bad” peace settlement. “There is despair in Ukraine, and people must be given hope,” the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, one of the lead drafters, told me. “So we need to redefine victory.”
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