1,001 Days of War in Ukraine
The conflict has been full of surprises—and it could still contain many more.
WEDNESDAY IS THE 1,001st day of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine.
But the war has actually been going on much longer.
Wednesday is also the 3,919th day since Russian forces attacked Crimea following the “Revolution of Dignity” that brought a pro-Western government to power in Kyiv; soon after that, the Kremlin-engineered separatist insurgency, often aided by Russian troops posing as “volunteers,” began in Eastern Ukraine.
Yes, there are other wars happening: in Gaza, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. Yet Europe is central to liberal civilization and to post-World War II stability—and the aggressor in this war is the direct heir to the empire that was our Cold War adversary.
No one knows how many lives have been lost since the February 24, 2022 invasion. Recent estimates put Russian casualties at 115,000 dead and some 500,00 wounded too seriously to return to combat (though there are many reports of Russian commanders trying to force injured soldiers back into service). Ukrainian casualties are estimated at approximately half that number—partly because Ukraine is not as willing to sacrifice its soldiers in suicidal assaults, partly because the country’s wounded receive better medical care.
On Ukraine’s side, there are also unknown numbers of civilian dead. In Mariupol alone, estimates of the overwhelmingly civilian body count from a siege that lasted nearly three months range from about 8,000 (from the Human Rights Watch, which cautions that the figure is preliminary and the real toll likely much higher) to a staggering 88,000.
There are the massacred civilians in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns freed from Russian occupation; a new Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe documentary tells the chilling story of several such executions, including that of a Bucha coffee shop owner hunted down because he had previously belonged to a territorial defense unit. There are the men, women and children left as their family’s sole survivors after bombings. Yes, some Russian civilians have also died in Ukrainian cross-border shelling directed at military targets. Their blood is on Putin’s hands, too.
For Russia, these 1,001 days have been a time of immense cultural and political degradation. Putin’s authoritarian regime has devolved into a de facto totalitarianism that not only squashes dissent—people expressing antiwar opinions or criticizing the government now frequently get more draconian sentences than Brezhnev-era Soviet dissidents—but demands fealty. One recent victim of repression is a 68-year-old Moscow pediatrician sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison because she allegedly told a patient’s mother that her ex-husband, who had been killed in Ukraine, was a “legitimate target” for Ukrainian soldiers. In another case, a Moscow man was arrested after his priest snitched on him for criticizing the war in a private conversation and quoting from the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill, nor covet thy neighbor’s house.”
Amid this moral rot, Russian schools have instituted mandatory “patriotic” lessons that laud the glory of dying for the country and teach the official Russian narrative that the “special operation” is a heroic mission to protect the Russian-speaking communities of the Donbas. When an exiled Belarusian activist sent several Russian schools a letter, supposedly from the ruling United Russia party, urging teachers to don tinfoil hats with the Russian flag for protection from “external enemies,” many dutifully complied and posted pictures.
Russian political television, a stew of propaganda and conspiracy theories even before the war, has degenerated into a freak show where hosts like Vladimir Solovyov and Olga Skabeyeva gloat over Ukrainian suffering, fret at the Russian army’s reluctance to bomb Ukrainian cities to smithereens, and fantasize about Russian tanks rolling over the capitals of Europe. They also assert that there is no better destiny for a Russian man than to die for Putin and country.
As for Putin, the new Russia he has created is clearly to his liking. In a recent appearance at the Valdai Club, he said that he “would not want Russia to return to the course it followed until 2022,” when he believes the West treated Russia as a “subordinate or semi-subordinate” country.
Just how the Russian people feel about all this is difficult to say, partly because polls are not a reliable measure of opinion under a dictatorship. In one recent survey, 76 percent of Russians supported the war but only 38 percent wanted it to continue while 54 percent preferred immediate peace talks. For now, most Russians remain insulated from the war’s effects—and for some who live in the country’s bleak impoverished regions, the war provides opportunities not only to make money but to gain respect.
Ukraine, amid shattering sacrifices, has emerged as a symbol of the fight for freedom in a world where authoritarianism is on the rise, with its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, an authentic hero for our time. He has rightly been compared to Churchill for his almost singular commitment to survival and eventual victory when no one else—including the Biden administration—thought it was possible.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the Biden administration that saw Ukraine’s defeat as virtually inevitable in the war’s early days. The Kremlin did too. Among Ukraine supporters, the dominant narrative was one of noble but futile resistance—exemplified by the Snake Island maritime border guards who responded to a Russian warship’s offer to surrender with the famous phrase, “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” and who were presumed to have been killed in the bombardment that followed. But there’s also symbolism in the fact that the Snake Island guards survived while the ship involved in the famous exchange, the cruiser Moskva, did fuck off to the bottom of the sea after being hit by two Ukrainian missiles in April 2023.
Unfortunately, Ukraine arrived at the 1,000-day mark after months of setbacks. Its situation is probably not as dire as its detractors claim. It is, for instance, slowly clawing back some lost ground near the city of Toretsk and inflicting a lot of damage on Russian troops. Russia’s attempts so far to drive the Ukrainians from Kursk, the Russian region that Ukraine has partially controlled since a daring August incursion, have failed. Nonetheless, Russia’s gains in Eastern Ukraine—while slow, relatively small, and extremely expensive in lives and equipment—are creating a new narrative of nearly inevitable Russian victory.
That narrative ignores serious troubles on Russia’s horizon, from the precarious state of the war-squeezed economy to the manpower shortages—in conjunction with Putin’s evident fears that large-scale mobilization will drive discontent. Strong, confident, modern militaries don’t turn to North Korea for help.
But Ukraine has its own morale problems, and the shifting fortunes of war are affecting Ukrainian opinion. While support for peace negotiations remains a minority view, the share of Ukrainians who agree that “under no circumstances should Ukraine give up any of its territories” even if it means that the war will last longer has dropped considerably in the last two years—from 87 percent in September 2022 to 58 percent this past October. And these numbers may underrate support for concessions. Ukrainians don’t have to fear reprisals for bucking the party line—but, as the staunchly patriotic Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Portnikov pointed out in a recent interview, some respondents may be embarrassed to tell a pollster that they would give away land for peace.
Perhaps most worryingly, one poll found that military-age Ukrainians—those under 45—are the most pessimistic about the war’s outcome and the least likely to support mobilization. Meanwhile, on the ground, the incredible bravery of Ukraine’s defenders coexists with draft-dodging and corruption.
War fatigue in Ukrainian society, initially energized by resistance to an invader and then buoyed by Western support and military successes in the war’s first year, is very real. It is likely exacerbated by the fact that in two months, the fate of American aid to Ukraine will be in the hands of Donald Trump. Zelensky now says that he wants the war to end by diplomatic means in 2025. Maybe he’s just stroking the ego of the American president-elect by claiming that Trump can help negotiate a deal, or maybe he thinks that’s really his country’s best option.
In its closing days, the Biden administration seems to be making a much delayed, last-ditch effort to shore up Ukraine with weapons and to untie its hands—approving antipersonnel land mines, which may be especially important in slowing down Russian advance, and strikes on military targets inside Russia. One may lament the lateness of these steps; but the more important question is whether they will help turn the tide and give Kyiv more leverage by the time negotiations begin. On Day 1,000 of the war, Ukraine reportedly used ATACMS missiles to destroy an ammunition storage depot in Russia’s Bryansk province, flexing its new muscle in a step both symbolic and practical.
Will it make a difference? The next two months will tell. For now, Ukraine is still standing and fighting.