Eurasia Press & News
It should not have been a surprise that the August 15 summit in Alaska between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump failed to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. It had long been clear that Putin was not prepared to offer any terms that would allow a credible peace to take hold and that a meeting thousands of miles from the conflict that did not include Ukraine had little chance of yielding a meaningful outcome. Above all, it had almost no relation to what is happening in Ukraine itself.
Since late spring, Ukrainians have faced an almost daily reality of massive missile and drone attacks on their cities amid an intensifying Russian offensive along 750 miles of frontlines. As they see it, the Trump-Putin summit only confirmed the sense that they will need to keep fighting for a long time to come—and that the United States can no longer be counted on to support them. Many are prepared for this fight, even if they don’t welcome it and even it means facing growing horrors, like Russia’s brutal August 28 attack on a five-story apartment building in Kyiv that left 22 dead. But there is something else that has become more critical than ever in sustaining this effort, after three and half years of unrelenting war: maintaining social cohesion and democratic accountability, or what Ukrainians like to call the “wartime trust.”
In July, Ukrainians staged the largest protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion began—the largest, in fact, since President Volodymyr Zelensky came to power in 2019. At one point, as many as 10,000 people gathered a few hundred meters from his office in Kyiv, with similar protests taking place in dozens of other towns across the country. The demonstrations were led by young people, but they were not complaining about the war or even the fact that many more of them, men and women, will be asked to fight the longer it continues. Instead, they were demanding limits to executive power, targeting a hastily enacted law that aims to curb the independence of Ukraine’s national anticorruption agencies: the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine (SAPO).
Along with the reality of waning Western support, the protests marked a turning point in the country’s democracy. Although a state of martial law continues, the main reason that Ukrainian society has mostly held together during the war is close cooperation among the government, private sector, civil society organizations, and citizens themselves. In the political sphere, most of the opposition parties have also rallied around the current leadership. But this united front will not endure on its own. As Ukrainians contemplate living in a state of war for years to come, their capacity to fight will depend even more on their ability to defend and strengthen the complex social and political bonds that have kept them and their government united.
NO END IN SIGHT
For much of the past year, Ukrainians have been coming to terms with a stark reality. Not only has Western support declined overall, despite concerted European efforts to compensate for American disengagement; there is also now little prospect that the war will end any time soon. The limits of U.S. support were already in question in late 2023, when a new $60 billion aid package stalled in Congress. In the spring and summer of 2024, however, the belated passage of that bill—along with the Biden administration’s decision to allow Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia—brought hope that the United States would finally provide Ukraine with the capabilities it needed to truly hurt Russia. In the run-up to the U.S. election that November, Zelensky unveiled a plan outlining how the United States and its European allies could help Ukraine win the war.
Since the election, and especially since Trump’s return to office in January, those hopes have dried up. Instead of providing more defense equipment to Ukraine and putting pressure on Russia, Trump has promised to secure a rapid peace deal and has now even met with Putin in what Ukrainians have interpreted mainly as a chance for Russia to try to force Ukraine to surrender. Meanwhile, on the substantive issues that a genuine peace accord would require, very little genuine progress has been made.
For Ukraine’s civilian population, as well as for its soldiers on the frontlines, the odds of a cease-fire in the coming months seem remote. Since the spring, Russia has poured even more resources into the fighting despite experiencing some of the highest casualty rates since the war began. In recent weeks, Russian forces put extraordinary pressure on the area around Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region, where for 18 months they had made very little progress. In mid-August, they achieved a notable breach in the frontline north of Pokrovsk, although Ukrainian forces have pushed them back from many of these gains in the days since. Russia has also carried out new offensive actions in Zaporizhzhia and other places along the front at high cost to troops on both sides.
Since late spring, Russia has meanwhile been stepping up its attacks Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, sometimes with more than 500 drones and missiles in a single night, in a clear effort to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses. (In the August 28 overnight attack on the country, the Ukrainian military shot down 563 drones and 26 missiles.) Although Ukrainian forces remain on the defensive, they retain the lead overall in the innovative deployment of drones. Russia currently surpasses Ukraine in the production of a few types of drones, but Kyiv remains ahead in many other kinds. Ukraine has also maintained a significantly lower casualty rate—the proportion of its forces killed, wounded, and missing—than Russia, which has suffered tremendous human losses.
But the high cost that Ukraine has imposed on Russia has been insufficient to compel the Kremlin to abandon its objectives. The Russian military continues to draw on a large and regularly replenished pool of manpower and appears to place almost no value on the lives of its soldiers. According to Ukrainian commanders, Putin appears determined to continue the war until Russia secures the full occupation of the Donetsk region. In Moscow’s official discourse, the war is still referred to as the “special military operation,” now framed primarily as the “liberation of Donbas,” the eastern Ukrainian region of which Donetsk is a major part.
This coveted territory includes Ukraine’s strategic “fortress belt,” a series of crucial defenses around the major cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk north of Pokrovsk. At the summit in Alaska, Putin suggested to Trump that this land—which Russian forces has been unable to capture or occupy—could simply be handed over to Russia in an eventual “deal.” At the same time, Russia is launching new assaults along other parts of the frontline, including around Zaporizhzhia and Sumy. These attacks appear to be part of an effort to stretch Ukraine’s defenses and keep Russia’s longer-term territorial goals alive, and they have come at a high cost to troops on both sides.
Given the hard fighting and relentless attacks on civilians and cities, many Western observers assume that Ukrainian support for continuing the war is eroding. A Gallup survey in July, for example, found that 69 percent of Ukrainians believed their country should seek a negotiated end to the war “as soon as possible”—a notable increase from late 2024—compared with just 24 percent who said they supported continuing to fight until Ukraine won the war. But these figures do not indicate that Ukrainians are prepared to surrender or that they are less prepared to fight in the short term. The survey also did not specify the precise conditions under which they would accept such a negotiated end—details that matter greatly to Ukrainians, most of whom, as other polls have shown, firmly reject Russia’s proposed plan and are not prepared for peace at any price.
Tellingly, the Gallup survey also showed that 68 percent of Ukrainians—nearly the same proportion who support a negotiated end to the war—thought it was “unlikely” that “active fighting will come to a lasting end” in the coming 12 months. In fact, Ukraine’s military resolve has never been in question. More critical may be the extraordinary social cohesion that has made the country so resilient.
TAKEN FOR GRANTED
Ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s resilience has been shaped by a mutual dependency between state and society. The people contribute and sacrifice for the war; many have volunteered to fight, and others have worked in government or the private sector to support the effort. In return, state institutions have kept them safe to the extent possible and continued to deliver services. Alongside this implicit social contract, martial law gave the state the legal right to restrict many aspects of civic and political life. Yet in practice, only measures directly tied to national security were enforced. When the state moved to impose broader limits, those steps have been justified as responses to security threats.
Through much of the war, the Ukrainian government has seemed to acknowledge the need to remain aligned with the public. When lawmakers were debating a new mobilization law in early 2024, for example, Zelensky understood that the new rules could not be rushed and had to take account of the people’s wishes. By contrast, the law curbing the independence of NABU and SAPO was rushed through parliament, with controversial amendments inserted at the last minute—almost as if to conceal them. For many Ukrainians, the anticorruption agencies have not only helped secure foreign aid, loans, and a path to EU accession; they are also a symbol of the country’s democratic transformation. Nonetheless, Zelensky quickly signed the law the day it was passed.
The enormous public outcry was significant for several reasons. Many Ukrainians saw the government as having crossed a redline in its expansion of executive power. Equally important was what the controversy suggested about Zelensky, who for perhaps the first time had misread the public mood. Sometimes described as a populist, Zelensky is often swayed by polling, and on issues such as negotiations with Russia and dealing with the United States and Europe, he has generally been aligned with mainstream Ukrainian opinion. To most of his constituents, the president’s wartime leadership has come to be viewed not as heroic or exceptional but simply as what any public official in his place should do. Yet in this case, according to many sources close to the government, the president had been personally involved in promoting, initiating, and negotiating a deeply unpopular law.
Ukrainians have a clearer understanding of what is at stake than their leaders.The protests exposed another vulnerability, as well. Zelensky has been criticized by the political opposition, civil society, and by some members of the armed forces for maintaining too sharp a divide between the frontline and the home front. A key part of his governing strategy has been to promote a sense of normalcy in civilian society: keeping businesses functioning and public life active, with restaurants, festivals, and bookstores, and reducing Ukrainians’ desire to leave the country. Amid the fighting, death, and destruction in the east and unremitting nighttime attacks on cities, however, these peacetime atmospherics can seem jarring. They may also be unsustainable.
In the eyes of his critics, Zelensky has allowed too many Ukrainians to remain physically and mentally demobilized, placing a greater burden on those already exhausted by years of fighting. In late August, the government announced a controversial decision to allow men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country freely. Although the official mobilization age begins at 25, some fear that the law could deprive the country of potential soldiers. Meanwhile, even after more than a year of debate, Ukrainian soldiers still have no defined term of service or demobilization plan. Unwilling to release the most experienced troops, the government has taken only minimal steps to ease their situation, such as a law signed at the end of July mandating 30 days of leave each year.
Manning the army continues to be a fraught issue. The government has generally used incentives rather than outright enforcement to mobilize people. Since approval of the mobilization law of April 2024, recruitment has been decentralized: individual brigades and divisions now conduct their own outreach and compete for new soldiers. This has created a situation in which the most highly regarded and resourceful units can bring in more recruits, and their ability to do so has become a measure of success as other units struggle for manpower. Overall, there are still many loopholes in the system, and current troop levels are far from adequate.
At home, wartime governance has been chaotic and uneven. Some businesses have faced pressure from the authorities over tax issues, law enforcement powers have been strengthened, and media freedoms have been curtailed. Concerns about corruption have also persisted, although Ukrainians are more worried about the expansion of executive power. Ukrainians tend to use the term “corruption” to describe any instance of poor governance, mismanagement, or inefficient bureaucracy. Selective justice is a problem, and there are suspicions that corruption allegations—whether by law enforcement bodies or a proliferation of dubious media outlets, Telegram channels, and bot farms—are being used against political opponents at the local and national level. Under Ukraine’s strict disclosure laws, even the omission of a small holding in an asset declaration can be enough to end a career. In this context, the Ukrainians protesting the July law were driven less by the imperative of fighting corruption than about marking the limits of governmental power. There was a broad sense that the authorities had begun to take public support for granted.
COURSE CORRECTION
If the mass protests triggered by the July law were entirely new to Zelensky’s Ukraine, they were a far cry from Euromaidan, the 2014 uprising that led to the downfall of Ukraine’s corrupt pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. The peaceful young Ukrainians who filled the streets in July were demanding that the state enforce accountability, preserve democratic norms, uphold the integrity of state institutions—and above all, ensure that the defense capacities of the armed forces were not undermined. They were also highly disciplined. When a handful of activists tried to turn the protests more directly against the Ukrainian leadership, others quickly intervened to steer the message back to upholding the integrity of state institutions. Many participants said they were not so much outraged as offended by how the government had treated the public.
On another level, the mere fact of calm, large-scale street activism amid the daily onslaught of a war that threatens Ukraine’s existence suggested how far the country’s democratic evolution has come. When the demonstrations began, the protesters did not notify the city of their plans and freely assembled; the following day, a 23-year-old activist submitted a formal notification to the Kyiv City Council. Despite the vast size of the crowd, policing was light: since Yanukovych ordered riot police to open fire on demonstrators in 2014, killing 78 people, the use of police force against protesters has become a political and moral taboo. Only the so-called dialogue police, trained for de-escalation rather than confrontation, were deployed; observing from a distance, senior officials expressed surprise at how well informed some of the teenage protesters were about the technical workings of the anticorruption institutions.
For Zelensky, there was little choice but to respond. Two days after signing the ill-considered law, with thousands of people in the streets, he proposed a revised statute restoring the independence of the anticorruption institutions. Some security officials, including the Security Service of Ukraine and the Prosecutor General’s Office, were uneasy about the reversal, which they viewed as a concession made under pressure. Nonetheless, people across the country continued to protest each day until the parliament took up the revised law on July 31.
The night before the scheduled vote, Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv, deploying more than 300 Shahed drones and eight Iskander-K cruise missiles. Of those, 21 drones and five missiles struck the capital, killing four people—including a six-year-old boy. Hours later, thousands of people gathered outside the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, to watch a live broadcast of the legislative session—aired at the request of an opposition member despite a post-invasion ban on such broadcasts. The updated law passed by an overwhelming majority, supported by 331 of the parliament’s 401 current members.
WITH THE WEST, AND WITHOUT
Although Ukraine’s political crisis appeared to have abated, the July controversy underscored the complexities of the government’s relationship with its Western partners. Many ordinary Ukrainians understand that key government reforms, particularly the creation of independent anticorruption agencies, are not just domestic priorities but also fundamental conditions for continued international support. These reforms were strongly encouraged, if not outright demanded, by the United States. Yet since Trump’s return to office in January, a new era has begun: although these reforms still matter to the European Union, the pressure on Ukraine to maintain them has eased. The government—and much of the public—can see that the overriding priority for the U.S. government now is American interests and economic deals rather than democratic reforms or political freedoms.
In parliament, there has been growing criticism of Ukraine’s Western-backed institutions, including the anticorruption agencies. Although Ukraine has historically lacked strong anti-Western voices, a bloc skeptical of foreign influence has clearly emerged, partly within Zelensky’s own party but most vocally through former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. (Once a leading pro-European figure and symbol of the country’s 2004 Orange Revolution, Tymoshenko now leads a small conservative party that holds 26 seats in parliament and is shaped by promoting religion, family, and skepticism toward European institutions.) In the view of this faction, Ukraine has ceded too much control over its internal affairs to Europe and the United States. Yet much of the Ukrainian public—and especially the protesters—see EU integration less as a matter of surrendering sovereignty than of aligning with a coveted set of shared norms. According to various polling in 2024 and 2025, up to 90 percent of Ukrainians now support joining the EU.
But the tension about Western influence is also apparent within the government. When Zelensky ran for president in 2019, he often criticized what he viewed as excessive Western intrusion into Ukrainian affairs. And throughout the war, his administration has maintained a delicate balance between asserting autonomy over domestic governance and meeting American and European expectations and standards. Even as the country has relied heavily on financial and military assistance from Washington and its European allies, it seeks to engage with these partners as an equal. And with the Trump administration less engaged with Ukraine’s crisis and European governments distracted by basic security questions, the government may feel it has more room to maneuver or to slow the pace of reforms.
Since the invasion, the EU itself has sometimes been uncertain about how to respond to Ukraine’s wartime leadership. By some measures—including public procurement, asset declarations, whistleblower protections, and financial monitoring of public officials—Ukraine’s transparency and anticorruption mechanisms now surpass those in many long-standing European democracies. On the other hand, as part of its action plan for EU accession, Ukraine has a detailed to-do list of further reforms, and while several of these are already underway, there are growing concerns that the government may try to water down the agenda.
THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL
As this summer’s protesters understood, Ukraine is not only fighting for its future as a nation-state. It is fighting for survival as a democracy. Among Putin’s various motivations for launching this war, foremost is the threatening alternative that Ukraine’s open political system presents to his own autocracy. The July crisis suggested that Ukrainian citizens appear to have a clearer understanding of what is at stake than their leaders. This time, the pressure did not come from Brussels or Washington; it came from the streets of Kyiv.
Confronting the reality of a United States that can no longer be counted on, Ukraine faces a challenge that is as much political as it is military. The country must learn to provide more of the defense industrial capacity it desperately needs, including the millions of drones that are now central to its war strategy. Although short-term relief may come from additional U.S. munitions such as interceptor missiles for Patriot systems, Ukraine will ultimately need to develop its own solutions. But the war must be sustained at home, as well. Both the leadership and the people must continue to build and defend the institutions that are essential to Ukraine’s democratic foundations, and neither can afford to lose the other. That will require preserving the glue that has held the nation together since the dark days of February 2022.
Moscow still portrays Ukraine as surviving only through Western aid, not as an independent state. But as Ukraine marks 34 years of independence, it is increasingly clear that it is its own resilience—as a state, a society, and a military power—that has allowed it to survive. For the real lesson of the past six months is that no one is fighting this war except Ukrainians themselves.
