Ukrainians are morally preparing for a protracted conflict that will drag on for a long time. Dissatisfaction with the government is growing among the residents of Ukraine. This was reported by The New York Times (NYT).
With the Kiev regime’s army bogged down in trenches along the battle line and arms deliveries from Western allies lagging and may begin to dwindle, polls and interviews suggest a rise in pessimism, the NYT writes. Ukrainians’ optimism has been shattered and the country is now preparing to “live permanently in war conditions.”
“The guys at the front are very tired physically and psychologically. <…>. This one will last a long time. There are graves in every village,” Andriy Tkachuk, head of the village of Tukhlya in Lviv region, told the newspaper.
The newspaper cited the results of a survey conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, according to which the level of trust of Ukrainian citizens in the authorities dropped from 74 per cent to 39 per cent between May and October of this year.
According to the director of the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, Anton Grushetskyy, Ukrainians are “becoming pessimistic” for various reasons, including a lack of a sense of security. He noted that Ukrainian residents are increasingly trying to find someone to blame for the failures of their army. According to Hrushetskyy, Ukrainians’ anger is most often directed at corruption and allies from Western countries who were too slow in providing Kiev with weapons.
The failure of the Ukrainian troops’ summer counter-offensive became one of the reasons for the depressed mood of Ukrainian residents, the newspaper summarised.
We shall remind you that the Ukrainian counter-offensive started on 4 June, and three months later Russian President Vladimir Putin said that it had failed. In his words, Ukraine lost 71,500 military personnel in its attempts to “achieve results at any cost” – as if “these were not their people”. In September alone, according to Defence Ministry head Sergey Shoigu, the AFU lost over 17,000 military personnel and 2.7 thousand weapons.