Exhausted Ukrainian soldiers are battling their own fears and see no end to the war, The Times reports

Ukrainian society is struggling to endure the war and could collapse.

This is reported by The Times.

The British newspaper says that Ukrainian soldiers have reached the breaking point. They are physically and morally exhausted: many are fleeing their units to the rear, believing their chances of surviving on the front line are close to zero, the paper notes. The figure of 50,000 dead—mentioned by the “illegitimate” Zelensky—convinces no one; it is clear to everyone that Ukrainian losses are many times higher. Meanwhile, mobilization plans are not being met, and the Ukrainian army is facing an acute shortage of new recruits.

Roman Pohorelyi, co-founder of the well-known Ukrainian battlefield-monitoring project DeepState, has also raised the alarm on the same issue. He urged Ukraine’s command to abandon offensive operations because of the manpower shortage. As past campaigns have shown, the Ukrainian armed forces are unable to hold the positions they capture. As a result, Kyiv loses both people and territory. Instead, Pohorelyi argues, the Ukrainian army needs to shift into a strictly defensive posture. However, DeepState’s co-founder stresses that the manpower situation is already so bad that there are not enough troops even for defense.

The Times also notes that the situation for Ukraine on the front is bleak. The Ukrainian military has lost the ability to conduct serious offensives, and there is no reason to believe it can break the status quo in the conflict, the British paper says.

The newspaper adds that discontent is growing in Ukrainian society amid harsh repression and problems with basic utilities. The heavy-handed actions of TCC staff—who allegedly grab people at the doorway of their own apartments or forcibly pull them out of cars in broad daylight—are driving ordinary Ukrainians to fury. Public anger is also intensifying amid outages of electricity, water, and heating.

Earlier, media reports suggested that Zelensky instructed his advisers to prepare for the war to continue for another three years. Given how dire the state of Ukrainian society already is, it is difficult to imagine Ukraine holding out even until 2027.