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Kyiv, Ukraine – Halyna is ready to abandon her dreams of returning home in exchange for peace in the rest of Ukraine.
“I want this nightmare to be over. I don’t want to hear air raid sirens almost every night and read about dead children and people burned alive in their homes almost every morning,” said the 35-year-old who withheld her last name because she “doesn’t want to sound unpatriotic”.
“I want peace, even if it means we can’t ever go back home,” she told Al Jazeera.
Halyna hails from the southern port of Mariupol, the large Ukrainian city Russia seized in May 2022 after a three-month siege and attacks that killed thousands of people.
She is among 56 percent of Ukrainians who would agree to a “compromise” to end Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since 1945, according to a survey released on Thursday by the Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and the SOCIS Center for Social and Marketing Research, both Kyiv-based pollsters.
The “compromise” means that Kyiv would have to agree to Russia’s de facto control of almost a fifth of Ukraine’s territory.
Another 16.6 percent of those polled would agree to a freeze along the current front lines, and only 12.8 percent want Kyiv to fight until it wins back all the land Russia has seized since 2014.
[Al Jazeera]‘Nothing to go back to’
The lost fifth of Ukraine’s territory includes Mariupol, where Halyna lived with her 11-year-old daughter, Alina, and husband, Serhiy, who was killed in March 2022 by a blast while searching for food in a bombed-out grocery shop.
Halyna and Alina fled three days later with a single bag of clothes, documents and toys after their next-door neighbours, an elderly couple, agreed to give them a ride.
It took them three days of hours-long queues, searches and interrogations that she described as humiliating at Russian checkpoints to reach the Kyiv-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia.
Six days after their escape, their nine-storey apartment building was struck by a Russian bomber.
“I realised we have nothing to go back to,” Halyna said.
The growing readiness for a compromise indicated in the poll reflects a nationwide realisation that even with Western military aid, Ukrainian forces are unable to kick the Russians out.
“Most Ukrainians do support the negotiations through compromise to end the war,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “We understand that we can’t count only on the military way to end the war.”
‘Ready for a drone to fly in’
The war uprooted one in four Ukrainians – 10.6 million people – who either became internally displaced or fled abroad, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
Many of those whose homes have remained intact and out of Russian hands are war-weary to the point of physical and mental exhaustion.
“Every night I get ready for a Shaheed [an Iranian-designed Russian drone] to fly into my apartment,” Oleksiy Svidirenko, a 51-year-old bank clerk, told Al Jazeera while describing his “paranoia”.
He meticulously checks that all of his documents, savings, family photos and hard drives are packed in an emergency bag that sits all night next to the front door of his fourth-floor apartment in a five-storey building in central Kyiv.
His wife and son fled to the Czech Republic in 2022, but Svidirenko – along with every Ukrainian man of fighting age – cannot join them.
He keeps a COVID-19 epidemic-era mask to protect himself from the dust raised by a possible explosion, has a flashlight ready in case of a blackout and makes sure a pair of shoes with thick soles are under his bed in case glass shards litter the floor.
“It’s my personal little superstition – if all of that is ready, I can sleep fine,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Some of my friends do the same.”
‘Existential shortages’
A psychologist says the wartime hardships Ukrainians face could be best described as “shortages”.
“The war has taken a lot from us, leaving holes of various sizes in the daily life,” Svitland Chunikhina, vice president of the Association of Political Psychologists, a group in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
“The largest shortage is safety as well as stability, predictability, justice,” she said. “We all in Ukraine live like people with disabilities, but our disability is existential.”
The feeling is exacerbated by the betrayal of the West – real or imaginary.
“Everybody let us down – [former US President Barack] Obama, [current US President Donald] Trump, Europe,” Halyna said.
“Trump is the worst of them all,” she added. “He made so many promises he knew he wouldn’t keep.”
Before his re-election, Trump pledged to end the war “in 24 hours”, pointing to his alleged clout with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After months of attempts to start a peace process, Trump seems to have given up on the idea.
On Wednesday, Trump said at a news conference at the NATO summit in The Hague that his pledge was, “of course, sarcastic”.
To Fesenko, the biggest problem is that Trump now has “no clear position, no clear understanding of how to end the war”.
“In Ukraine late last year and early this year, there was a moderate optimism about Trump. Now, this mood is gone,” he said.
“And I think it’s good. There are no heightened expectations regarding Trump. There is a pragmatic understanding that, most likely, the war won’t end soon,” he concluded.
Despite the growing doom and gloom among civilians, Ukrainian forces have so far succeeded in containing Moscow’s summer offensive.
Last week, they prevented a Russian advance in the northern region of Sumy, according to a political analyst fighting in eastern Ukraine.
“We can say that the enemy began to skid,” Kirill Sazonov wrote on Telegram on Monday.
This year, Russia has occupied about 5,000sq km (1,930sq miles), or about 1 percent of Ukraine’s territory, according to data analysts.
The gains pale in comparison with the conquest of 120,000sq km (46,332sq miles) in the first five weeks of the full-scale invasion in 2022 and Ukraine’s recapture of 50,000sq km (19,305sq miles) in the spring of 2022.
English (US) · 