Halyna is prepared to leave her homeland in Kyiv, Ukraine, and seek peace elsewhere.
“I want to have ended this nightmare.” The 35-year-old who withheld her last name because she “doesn’t want to sound unpatriotic” said, “I don’t want to read about dead children and people burned alive in their homes almost every morning and hear air raid sirens almost every night.”
She told Al Jazeera, “I want peace, even if that means we can’t ever go back home.”
After a three-month siege and deadly attacks that claimed the lives of thousands of people, Halyna was born in Mariupol, a large Ukrainian city that Russia seized in May 2022.
According to a survey conducted by the Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and the SOCIS Center for Social and Marketing Research, both Kyiv-based pollsters, she is one of 56% of Ukrainians who would consent to a “compromise” to end Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since 1945.
According to the “compromise,” Kyiv would have to consent to having essentially control over almost a fifth of Ukraine’s territory.
Only 12.8% of respondents want Kyiv to fight until it recovers all the land Russia has seized since 2014, compared to 16.6% of respondents who support a freeze along the current front lines.
There is nothing to return to.
Mariupol, where Halyna and her 11-year-old daughter Alina lived, is the lost fifth of Ukraine’s territory. Serhiy was killed in a blast while searching for food in a bombed-out grocery store in March 2022.
After their elderly next-door neighbor agreed to give them a ride, Halyna and Alina escaped three days later with just one bag of clothes, belongings, and toys.
She described the hours-long queues, searches, and interrogations at Russian checkpoints as humiliating, and it took them three days to get to Zaporizhzhia, which is under the control of Kyiv.
A Russian bomber struck their nine-story apartment building six days after their escape.
Halyna said, “I realized we had nothing to go back to.”
The poll’s findings reveal a growing sense of urgency for a compromise and a recognition that Ukrainian forces cannot expel the Russians even with Western military assistance.
Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, stated to Al Jazeera that “the majority of Ukrainians support the negotiations through compromise to end the war.” We are aware that the only way to put an end to the war is through military means.
“Ready for a drone to fly in”
According to the UN refugee agency, one in four Ukrainians (10.6 million people) were displaced internally or fled to other countries as a result of the conflict.
Many of those whose homes have survived and aren’t in Russian hands are physically and mentally exhausted.
Oleksiy Svidirenko, a 51-year-old bank clerk, described his “paranoia” as “every night I get ready for a Shaheed [an Iranian-designed Russian drone] to fly into my apartment.
In a five-story building in central Kyiv, he meticulously checks that all of his papers, savings, family photos, and hard drives are contained in an emergency bag that stays next to the front door at night.
In 2022, Svidirenko and his wife and son emigrated to the Czech Republic, but they were unable to join them along with all Ukrainian men of comparable age.
In case glass shards strewn on the floor, he ensures a pair of shoes with thick soles are under his bed and a COVID-19 epidemic-era mask to protect himself from the dust that might come from an explosion.
He said, “If all of that is ready, I can sleep soundly,”s my personal little superstition,” gesturing indignantly. “Some of my friends do the same,” I said.
Existential shortages: what are they?
According to a psychologist, the hardships Ukrainians experience during the war could best be described as “shortages.”
Svitland Chunikhina, vice president of the Association of Political Psychologists in Kyiv, stated to Al Jazeera, “The war has taken a lot from us, leaving holes of various sizes in the daily life.”
Safety, stability, predictability, and justice are the main concerns, she said. Our disability is existential, but we all live like disabled people in Ukraine.
Real or imagined, the West’s betrayal amps up the feeling.
“Everyone let us down,” Halyna said of former US president Barack Obama and current US president Donald Trump, as well as Europe.
Trump, she continued, is “the worst of them all.” He made numerous promises that he was certain he would not keep.
Trump allegedly had a “in 24 hours” commitment to end the war, citing his alleged influence over Russian President Vladimir Putin before his re-election.
Trump appears to have given up on the idea after months of attempting to start a peace process.
Trump claimed at a press conference on Wednesday that his stance was “of course sarcastic” at the NATO summit in The Hague.
According to Fesenko, Trump’s biggest issue is that he now “has no clear position or understanding of how to end the war.”
There was a moderate optimism about Trump in Ukraine late last year and early this year. He claimed that this state of being is now gone.
“And I think it’s good,” she continued. No more high hopes for Trump are there. He said, “There is a logical understanding that the war won’t probably end right away.”
Ukrainian forces have so far been successful in halting Moscow’s summer offensive despite the civilian population’s growing sense of doom and gloom.
According to a political analyst fighting in eastern Ukraine, they blocked a Russian advance last week in Sumy’s northern region.
On Monday, Kirill Sazonov wrote on Telegram that “we can say that the enemy began to skid.”
According to data analysts, Russia has occupied about 5% of Ukraine’s territory this year, or about 1%.
