An interesting article, albeit a month old, from the pro-war New Statesman.
'Eighteen months into the
war in Ukraine the breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom. This is the deepest trough of despair that the wartime media has entered yet: the past month of reporting has given us new admissions about a war that increasingly appears to be locked in bloody stalemate, along with a portrait of Ukraine and its leadership shorn of the rote glorification and hero worship of the conflict’s early days. The deadlock has increasingly resembled brutal, unabating, First World War-style combat, with the Ukrainian army rapidly depleting artillery ammunition supplied by the West. Distant audiences, who always treated the war as a team sport, and Ukraine as an underdog defying the odds against a larger aggressor, are thinning out; surely many will soon turn their attention to the partisan conflict of the forthcoming US presidential election. Optimists say the change in the media’s tone is indicative of little more than the inevitable pendulum swings of war and that Ukraine may yet emerge victorious. But such a view elides a host of unavoidable realities.'
'Compounding the disillusionment is the fact that the early shock of the war has worn off, meaning it’s lost some of its initial sense of urgency – especially as war takes its toll far beyond Ukraine. “There was the initial widespread feeling of revulsion; then, people were naturally drawn towards ‘we must not compromise’, and moral and strategic maximalism,” Porter said. “That’s easier to hold when you’re not yet feeling the pain. Now, materially, there are costs everywhere.” And while the immediate convulsion of fear that accompanied the full-scale invasion was so strong that it prompted Sweden and Finland to apply to join Nato, the initial panic has since faded, and evolved into a more ambient dread about a long war of attrition, rising inflation, recession and food insecurity.
Recently, Ukraine itself has also been depicted in a more complicated light. On 19 August the
New York Times published a story about Kyiv’s wartime policy of jailing conscientious objectors
. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s new proposal to equate corruption with treason, transferring cases from anti-graft agencies to the security service, was
met with unusually harsh condemnation in Politico. And this summer both the
Guardian and
BBC have published articles about Ukrainian deserters and men employing other means to avoid conscription, including barricading themselves inside their homes and using Telegram channels to warn other men about the location of roving military recruitment officials. On 24 February 2022 a presidential decree imposed martial law which forbade men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine. But
according to a BBC report in June this year, tens of thousands of men have crossed the Romanian border alone, and at least 90 men have died attempting to make the perilous crossing, either freezing to death in the mountains or by drowning in the Tisa River.
Further, the
Economist recently published an article about the Ukrainian public’s waning morale. Most men eager to defend Ukraine joined the armed forces long ago, and many are now dead. The country now recruits among those effectively forced. Individually, stories about conscientious objectors, deserters, those hiding from conscription, and a war-weary public can appear anecdotal, but taken together, they begin to undermine one of the foundational tenets of the war: that Ukrainians want to fight, in the words of
Joe Biden, the US president, “for as long as it takes”. And as expectations are dramatically scaled back, one cannot help but ask: for as long as it takes to do what?'
As the much-hyped counteroffensive against Russian forces stalls, the West is asking hard questions about the war in Ukraine.
www.newstatesman.com
www.politico.eu
