‘Russia is not winning’: Ukraine frontline soldiers say ‘weak’ Moscow should be negotiating with its back to the wall

We’re fed up with fighting but there will have been no point if we give in to Putin now, as Trump wants us to. So, we’ll fight on whatever anyone tells us to do,” a senior officer in Ukraine says.

As the third anniversary of the war fast approaches, soldiers on the front line are outraged by the assumption made by their country’s allies that their war against Russia is lost and that now is the time to sue for peace.

“Russia is not winning in Ukraine. They’re not losing but they’re just not winning,” says Kallas, a senior officer in a specialist brigade that deploys across much of the 1,300km front line. “The enemy are making very small gains for an enormous cost in men and equipment. They’re not having any operational successes of any significance and they’re definitely not able to use anything like the amounts of artillery and armour that we saw a few months ago.”

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Ukraine is staying ahead of Russia in the drone war and in the Kursk salient, a lozenge of Russian land captured last year by Kyiv’s forces, Zelensky’s forces are managing to use Nato-style manoeuvre tactics which free its forces to attack rather than defend trench lines.

Kyiv has relied on about $232bn in military and financial aid from the US and Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. The US has contributed about half of that, plus around $62bn in security assistance.

However, that aid is now in doubt as Donald Trump embarks on “peace talks” with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine but excluding Kyiv from the process.

Ukraine has lost many of its best troops in three years of war since Russia’s invasion forces stormed across the vast landscape and came close to capturing the capital.

The invaders were held back by the determination of many ordinary Ukrainians, and local commanders, to ignore the chaos in the top ranks of their own army.

“Achilles” was one such warrior, a veteran who volunteered as a teenager to fight Russia’s first invasion in 2014. When I met him fighting south of Izium, then in Russian hands, that summer he had been destroying Russian armour near Kyiv and was now blocking the Russian advance south towards Sloviansk. His group of reconnaissance soldiers were using a tank they had captured and boasted it had destroyed half a dozen Russian T-80s over the last week or so.

A self-taught expert with Nato-supplied Javelin and British-supplied LNAW anti-tank missiles, Achilles had a bullet-riddled broken Javelin rolling about in the back of the pickup they used on hit-and-run missions. He was exhausted and gloomy that June morning. A couple of weeks later, a Russian tank shell almost took the side of his head off – the other side was protected by the Javelin on his shoulder he was about to fire.

Of Achilles’s original group of about 15 men, half are dead or too badly injured to fight. But the rest remain adamant that they will fight on unless a peace deal delivers security for their country – even if it means losing some land.

They said they didn’t understand why, now of all times, all talk is of the need for Ukraine to pursue peace with Russia.

A former MI6 officer who specialised in Russian affairs agreed. “Russia should be in negotiations from a position of weakness,” he said. “The economy is on its knees, it’s dependent on unreliable friends in Iran, China and North Korea, and its war in Ukraine is going nowhere”.

Earlier this week, Russian expert and author Owen Matthews wrote in The Independent: “Last summer, the price of eggs jumped by 42 per cent, bananas by 48 per cent, tomatoes by 39.5 per cent and potatoes by 25 per cent. The Russian rouble has lost over half of its value since Putin first invaded Crimea in 2014, and over $600bn of the Kremlin’s foreign currency reserves have been frozen in Western banks.”

The war in Ukraine consumes about 40 per cent of public expenditure and given the scale of the Russian losses in Ukraine, what Putin thought would be a quick war has turned into a quagmire. The Tony Blair Institute estimates that additional EU spending on an extra $40bn in military aid to Ukraine would be enough to match the Russian efforts.

Ronald Reagan famously argued that the Soviet Union could be brought down by Western spending. It worked. Russia’s military machine and its economy can be crashed if Europe is prepared to take on some of the financial costs while Ukrainians pay with their lives.

In Europe, there’s a powerful assumption that Ukraine cannot hang on much longer. That fear has been intensified by the Trump administration which has threatened to cut off funding and military support to the country.

Trump himself believes Ukraine either started the war or brought it on itself with its stated aim of one day joining Nato. He has also endorsed almost every known Russian negotiating principle and the lie that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr has no governing mandate.

Zelensky, he said, is a “dictator” who conned the Biden administration into funding Ukraine’s war to the tune of $350bn. The entire set of allegations is a lie, of course, and it misses one important element.

Zelensky is the public face of the Ukrainian defence against Russia and its fundraiser-in-chief. But he is a bigger figure in the minds of people outside Ukraine than inside the country. There is no personality cult, no “Vlodism” as there is Trumpism and Putinism. If the Ukrainian president resigned tomorrow, Ukraine’s fight against Russia would not be in the least affected.

In Ukraine, frontline soldiers want the weapons they need to force Russia into talks. It’s as simple as that.

Major “Sneaky” was a reconnaissance commander of a mixed company of foreign volunteers and Ukrainian soldiers at the forefront of Ukraine’s liberation of Kherson in the autumn of 2022. The privately purchased weapons, night vision goggles and communications systems were critical in their victory, and in keeping them alive in raids across the Dnipro River against Russian forces.

“I really hope, as a Ukrainian, that what Trump is saying publicly now is to cloud the eyes of the Russians,” he says. “If not, then this is very similar to the causes of the Second World War with the division of Czechoslovakia [by the Allies and Germany in 1938] and I, as a Ukrainian, of course, would not want to be in the epicentre of the third world war.”

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