
I’d been advised against sitting next to him, a massive, bellicose, aggressive bowl of a man in the bar with a bald head full of tattoos in a bar in Lviv walking with a stick. He was violent, I was warned. Nevertheless I went to sit next to him, because I knew he was a soldier recently returned from the front. He had a habit of shouting at the bar staff in Russian, which a lot of the soldiers do in Lviv, because a surprisingly large proportion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces speak Russian. They don’t know Ukrainian well enough to communicate, and in wartime conditions although everyone is told to speak Ukrainian there are no facilities to teach them and therefore in the East and the South, and in the capital Kyiv, a large amount of daily business goes on in the Russian language. And that includes in government offices and it includes in the military. It’s only in Lviv that this sort of snobbery has arisen that you have to learn Ukrainian - but how? Outside the west of the country, if you were lucky, you were taught it in secondary school but the language you spoke at home was Russian. The bar staff where I go in Lviv are not immune to it either: they insist on speaking Ukrainian to all the customers but occasionally lapse into a few words of Russian when speaking with each other. Why? A number of them are internally displaced people from the Donbas region including Donetsk, and it’s the natural language for them even if as in some cases they’ve been displaced for ten years.
Anyway I started up conversation with this gentleman against advice, but it turned out that he spoke surprisingly good English and of course he was a soldier on leave. Just because your head and face are covered in tattoos doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t educated or intelligent; living through war, people have tattoos in Ukraine almost as a way of passing the time or showing their identity. Don’t judge a book by its cover. I asked him why he was walking with a stick and it was because all the toes in one foot had been lost due to frostbite. He told me that I was the first person he’d really been able to talk to. Nobody in the military cares about anything as trivial as losing your toes to frostbite; he had been relegated to a military hospital then military barracks in Lviv; and he had nobody to talk to and nothing to do except drink. He wasn’t violent at al; he was depressed, and he wasn’t with the soldiers he’d known. He’d come back to nothing. His friends are all conscripted to various places and everyone looks down on him because he looks violent and scary.
Why are soldiers losing their toes to frostbite in the twenty-first century? The answer is because the kit they are wearing remains from the Soviet era and is totally inadequate, and no matter how much money the West pours into supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces you cannot change the mentality: the money needs to be spent to buy proper kit. Proper kit can be bought in Ukraine; but nobody bothers except a few over-energetic volunteers who have some experience from the West and want to come “fully kitted out”. The bulk of the Ukrainian military would rather just give their salaries to their families, so paying them enough to buy their own kit doesn’t work. And the military procurement system is so appallingly corrupt that it is incapable of distributing anything like warm socks in the hundreds of thousands that they are needed amongst the 1,000 kilometre front line. In everything in this war, people turn to chaotic means such as ad hoc fundraising on the internet to raise a couple of hundred dollars to buy socks that then get distributed to a military official who passes them onto his mother or grandmother for sale at the local market. This is no way to prevent frostbite in a frontline army of over 500,000 men; in fact it is worse than useless because it perpetuates corruption and is basically a waste of donors’ money that might be spent through proper charitable means.
I contrast the conditions on the frozen battlefield, where infantry soldiers are being demobilised because they are succumbing to frostbite, with the frozen nature of this conflict. Despite daily reports of the Russians haven taken this or that obscure village with a population of 300 (or actually 0 - everybody is dead or has fled and every building has been raised to the ground), this is Russian propaganda and with one exception - Avdiivka, near the Russian occupied capital Donetsk, which fell in February 2024, the front line hasn’t really much moved in the last 12 months. Actually it hasn’t really moved much since November 2022, when the Russians evacuated Kherson. There’s a natural geographical border, the River Dnipro, and a series of positions that have been dug in along the front line since 2014 up and down the Donbas. The Ukrainians have occupied a piece of Russian territory, Kursk, but it’s a tiny amount of territory that’s been occupied compared to the enormous expanse of the Russian Federation, the biggest country in the world. Ukraine is the biggest country in Europe if you discount Russia (which is mostly in Asia), so advances of 100-200 metres per day by the Russians in eastern Ukraine are pitiful in comparison to Ukraine’s full size. These two gigantic armies are fighting and dying over minuscule pieces of land, and they are pouring more soldiers and ammunition and drones and mortars into getting nowhere.
This is already a frozen conflict. All this talk about the Russians causing a Ukrainian rout are nonsense; they haven’t been able to do over the entirety of the war, and the Ukrainian logistics and supply lines to the front are as strong as they have ever been. Now the terrain of the war is shifting to the question of who can make the best infrared or heatseeking drones with the biggest warheads and the highest speeds and how to block or intercept them; there are drones with fibre optic cables but not many of them and of course they can’t go so far; these are what all the military magazines are now writing about. But it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t take territory using drones; you can only do it with tanks and infantry, and the rate of progress for either side is so appallingly slow that this war could go on for 30 years at this rate, draining the global economy and drawing us all in and that would be still further a waste of lives and money.
The frozen conflict has to be frozen into a frozen peace, in which people don’t fire their weapons anymore. The world is full of frozen conflicts and they often last like that for decades; look at North Korea. Some frozen conflicts suddenly change; look at Nagorno-Karabakh, successfully retaken by Azerbaijan from Armenia in 2024 after 42 years of occupation by Armenia, because the Russian peacekeeping troops were insufficient to stop a renewed Azeri army. The Russians are still fighting with their knackered old machines, troops and equipment in Ukraine, totally unable even to operate effectively in a tiny enclave like Nagorno-Karabakh against Azerbaijan, a country increasingly using its oil wealth to establish a small but effective military.
The key therefore is to ignore all these strategic analyses about how the Russians might push through here or there on the front line and overwhelm the Ukrainians. Anyone with significant experience of the front line understands that there can be no sudden push or rout because everything is mined, there are tank traps everywhere and for half the year the weather makes any sort of progress impossible. In December, January and February, soldiers’ principal concerns are issues as trite as how to stop their toes from falling off given the lack of proper socks in their trench conditions. Instead the conflict must be frozen, like many others, with security guarantees, and then Ukraine’s Armed Forces must be comprehensively reformed and the whole culture and attitude in Ukraine towards corruption and public service dramatically remodelled. This will take a long time but it is part of the EU and NATO integration process and it can’t begin while this war is going on but doing it will be far cheaper than continuing to fund this war so that is what the US President will be mandated to do: to use whatever means he needs, including overwhelming force if necessary, to freeze this conflict without fighting continuing any further.
When will Ukraine finally get her lands back? I cannot tell. She has lost 5% of her territory since 2022 (the other 15% was lost in 2014) and all for a huge loss of life. It is preposterous to go on fighting like this. At some point Russian politics will implode but it is impossible to predict what will ever happen in Russia. Then a diplomatic resolution of the occupied Ukrainian territories might be possible -but it would again require massive institutional reform because by then (hopefully) Ukraine will have been Europeanised but the occupied territories will have become ever more Russified. So there is nation building work to be done for decades, even after a Russian implosion (that will probably coincide with the death of Vladimir Putin or some events occurring to his successor, because like Stalin he has nobody around him as skilled he is in government by terror and assassination.) But now the war needs to stop, and these scarred and injured soldiers need taking care of and reintegrating somehow into society. That will be another huge job and will require the EU and NATO military expertise to help the Ukrainians do it right. We can’t imagine how big a job we have on our hands.