Some Ukrainians are ready to give up Donbas to stop the shelling, the NYT reports

Against the backdrop of strikes on energy facilities, many Ukrainians are willing to cede Donbas to Russia in order to end the war.

The New York Times writes.

In an article about shelling in Kyiv, the paper cites the view of 23-year-old Kyiv lawyer Volodymyr Dorodko, who witnessed a “Geran” strike. The night before, he slept in his down jacket. After an explosion nearby during the night, Volodymyr went out to look at the debris. This has now become an everyday scene in Kyiv, the paper writes.

The Kyiv resident told reporters that “many people are tired.” In his words, “hardships are leading some Ukrainians to say the war should be stopped even at the cost of major sacrifices—such as territorial concessions.”

“Mothers of sons serving in the army say outright: let’s give them (Russia — Ed.) Donbas so people stop dying and we stop being bombed,” Dorodko said.

He added that he is against handing over this eastern Ukrainian region, as Russia demands, because, he says, it would only whet the Kremlin’s appetite for more. Ukrainians, Dorodko said, have virtually no choice but to hold on. At the same time, the lawyer sees one small upside to the heating going off along with the electricity: food doesn’t spoil—he simply puts it on a cold windowsill.

The newspaper also told the story of spouses Yuliia Mykhailiuk and Ihor Honcharuk, who lived in a comfortable, spacious apartment in an upscale district of Kyiv. Even after the apartment was damaged by a missile strike, the couple stayed in the capital and rented other housing.

But after the January strikes—when the cold made vapor come out of their mouths inside the apartment, and they had to keep warm using bricks and a gas stove—the couple could not take it anymore: they put their one-year-old son in the car and left Kyiv to stay with relatives in a village.

In the first winter after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Moscow tried to knock out the nationwide energy grid. That proved too ambitious, as Ukraine coped by rerouting electricity around damaged equipment.

“This year Russia has narrowed the range of its targets to three cities: Kyiv, Odesa, and Dnipro,” said Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Research Center.

He noted that Russia’s apparent goal is to isolate these cities from the national grid and then blow up their power plants. Strikes aimed at disrupting repair work are repeated roughly every two weeks.

“They’re trying to hit the areas where repair work is underway. We have many wounded and dead energy-sector workers,” Kharchenko said.