The War in Ukraine Is Already Over—Russia Just Doesn’t Know it Yet
Wars end long before armistices are signed. A war’s end, after all, is a matter of will, of spirit—and popular will is only haltingly, grudgingly reflected in the political machinery of peace talks.
Though it may seem astonishingly premature to say so, my impression after returning from the Russian front is that the war in Ukraine is over and that the powers that be haven’t realized it yet. In the Kursk salient, at least, I can personally attest to the eerie, almost surreal inversion of spirits between the people of Ukraine and Russia. The moral scales have now firmly settled on the side of the Ukrainian defenders, and it is far likelier that Russia itself splinters into its constituent republics than that Ukraine falls to its erstwhile invaders.
I was in Irpin and Bucha nearly three years ago, while they were still smoldering from Russian occupation. The mood then, as we pulled burned bodies with bound hands from the tree lines, was a tragedy-enforced grim determination. Evidence of Ukrainian resistance was everywhere: crates of Molotov cocktails on street corners, invective-laced messages scrawled on storefronts, spent shell casings piled behind makeshift barriers against the intruders—all of it unequivocally pointing to a deep-seated resolve.
In Russia today, it is entirely different—it is a moral vacuum. Its citizens in Kursk fled the Ukrainian advance like smoke in the wind, leaving homes and possessions without so much as a whimper. I saw exactly one makeshift roadblock, consisting of a few chairs and a rake. Russian civil resistance is (or was) desultory at best. The comparison is stark: Despite Russia’s enormous advantages in mass and material, the will to fight is fundamentally absent.
Ukrainian morale, meanwhile, is topping the charts—bordering on euphoria even. A fervent passion for taking the fight to their enemies has infected the front and operations are conducted amid a general scrum of units desperate to be part of the action. A sense of Wild West–like possibility draws a cast of aggressive fighters, many eagerly engaging in their own semiprivate pirate operations in the
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