A Tale of Ukrainian War Fatigue—or Pro-Russia Sympathies?
A Ukrainian journalist’s story isn’t everything it seems. Here’s what the Free Press left out.
THE FATE OF AMERICAN AID FOR UKRAINE hangs in the balance: Will Donald Trump pressure the Ukrainians into accepting a bad peace? Although the president-elect has paid lip service to support for Ukraine, he frequently depicts its fight as a pointless sacrifice—so it’s reasonable to wonder whether he will attempt to force Ukraine to give up land—thereby rewarding Russian aggression—in exchange for security guarantees that may not last.
In this precarious situation, the question of how Ukraine is faring in the war, and whether its people want peace or victory, acquires a new urgency. Recent polls show that the share of Ukrainians who want to continue the war until Ukraine has liberated all of its occupied territory is dwindling, and perhaps even falling below 50 percent. Reports of war fatigue in Ukraine, especially among troops on the frontlines, have proliferated.
Amid these reports, an article published last week in the Free Press—“Ukrainians Are Sick of the War. But We’re Not Allowed to Say It”—is puzzling in several ways. For one thing, the article, a first-person account by Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Filimonov given to Free Press writer Tanya Lukyanova, presents as a heretical truth something that a number of mainstream media outlets in the West have been reporting for a while (namely, that large number of Ukrainians are exhausted and demoralized). For another, it blames Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for the war’s continuation in ways that startlingly echo some standard anti-Ukraine talking points. And while the widespread war fatigue described by Filimonov is undoubtedly real, the article offers some clues—such as his passing comment that he always expected to be a “conscientious objector” if war began—that his perspective does not exactly reflect the Ukrainian mainstream.
Filimonov also points to his personal experience as evidence of intolerance toward dissent in modern-day Ukraine: He says his name was added to the Myrotvorets (“Peacekeeper”) database, a privately maintained but influential blacklist of offenders against “the national security of Ukraine”—causing him to lose his press credentials and to be harassed at the border while traveling abroad—simply because he had traveled to the pro-Russia “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. Myrotvorets does have an unfortunate record of putting people on its list for absurd reasons.1 But Filimonov’s history turns out to be considerably more complicated than his account lets on.
FILIMONOV’S PERSONAL TALE—the “animalistic rage” he felt when Russia started bombing Kyiv; his determination to help as a volunteer taking women, children, and elderly people to safety; his younger brother’s harrowing experiences on the frontlines—is compelling. So is his pain when he laments that the patriotic enthusiasm and unity of the early days of the invasion, when Ukrainians living abroad flocked home to defend their country and ordinary men and women met wartime challenges with fortitude and humor, feel like a “distant memory” after three years of war and that widespread pessimism, division, and distrust have set in. But, once again: It’s not that difficult to find other reports that say the same thing.
What sets Filimonov’s account apart is his explanation for why the war has continued—and his allocation of blame. He argues that after Ukrainian forces drove the Russian army out of the Kyiv region, Zelensky should have “seiz[ed] that moment to negotiate from a position of strength.” Instead, he suggests, the Ukrainian president made a “political decision” to keep going because it would bolster his heroic image, placing “optics” over “human lives.”
This makes little sense.
Ukraine’s success at kicking the Russian army out of the Kyiv region by the start of April 2022, before receiving any significant military assistance from the West, was indeed a triumph—though the Russian retreat was not the kind of chaotic flight Filimonov describes, with Russian soldiers “abandoning equipment and supplies.” (He may be thinking of the retreat from the Kharkiv region in September 2022.) Nonetheless, the idea that Ukraine was in a “position of strength” at that point is highly questionable: Russia still controlled portions of the Kharkiv region as well as Kherson. Ukraine is almost certainly in a stronger position today, when it has recaptured Kherson and virtually all of the Kharkiv region; when it holds a portion of Russian territory in the Kursk region; when it has basically expelled the Russian navy from the Black Sea; and when it is able to strike military targets within Russia even without Western long-range weapons, using sophisticated drones. Yes, Ukraine is far more exhausted today than it was in early 2022. But so is Russia.
Moreover, Filimonov fails to mention some other important facts. One is that Russia’s “peace” offer to Ukraine in the spring of 2022 was an offer of unilateral capitulation. Territorial concessions aside, it included a demand not only for neutral status (that is, the abandonment of NATO membership as a goal) but also for the “demilitarization” of Ukraine—that is, near-total disarmament and the drastic reduction of its armed forces. This would have left the country unable to fight back against any future Russian invasion and fully reliant on promises from Western allies to come to Ukraine’s defense.
No less important—and strikingly missing from Filimonov’s account—is the gruesome fact that negotiations broke down in large part because of the discovery of horrific Russian war crimes in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs during the occupation.
FOR PHILLIPS O’BRIEN, PROFESSOR OF STRATEGIC studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Filimonov’s discussion of a potential peace deal in April 2022 is a “tell” revealing a Russia-friendly slant: “This is a mythical notion,” O’Brien told me in an email exchange last week, “pushed by those who are trying to undermine Ukraine’s position now.” Is this too harsh an assessment? A look at Filimonov’s background may provide some answers.
Let’s start with the claim that Filimonov was regarded as suspect and landed on the Myrotvorets blacklist simply because he traveled to Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014/2015 as a reporter (then with Ukraine’s Channel 17). In fact, it wouldn’t be particularly unreasonable to look askance at Filimonov after such a visit to these pro-Moscow gangster statelets, since they have a history of being extremely inhospitable to any journalists, or for that matter any outsiders, who were unwilling to collaborate with them. In the spring of 2014, several visiting journalists, including American reporter Simon Ostrovsky, then with Vice, and independent Russian reporter Pavel Kanygin of Novaya Gazeta, were abducted, held prisoner, threatened with death, and physically abused. A Ukrainian journalist being able to freely cross into the “DPR” and “LPR” and back into Ukraine proper was inevitably going to raise eyebrows.
What’s more, as Ukrainian media analysts pointed out at the time, Filimonov’s reporting, and more generally that of Channel 17, was distinctly sympathetic to the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists. He actively urged fellow journalists to come to Donetsk, offering them help with accreditation. He even hosted teleconferences bringing Ukrainians and Donbas insurgents together; participants included Luhansk commander Alexei Mozgovoi, a militant Russian nationalist notorious for holding “people’s courts” where death sentences were decided by a show of hands from spectators. (Credit where credit’s due: Filimonov’s bridge-building initiatives resulted in the release of at least one Ukrainian prisoner held by the insurgents.)
Filimonov also tended to credulously echo pro-separatist and pro-Russian narratives in his statements. In June 2015, he told Rusinform, a staunchly pro-Kremlin Russian news site, that the conflict in the Donbas was not a covert Russian war against Ukraine but a “civil war” fought by misguided people on both sides. (This, despite ample evidence that the insurgency was instigated and initially led by Russian citizens, often with ties to intelligence or security services; that it was later sustained and directed from the Kremlin; and that Russian troops were, as an Atlantic Council report put it, “hiding in plain sight” in the Donbas enclaves.) At times, Filimonov seemed to take a more positive view of the “people’s republics” than of Ukraine proper.2
In 2015, Filimonov appeared at least twice on pro-Russia shows based in Donetsk and Luhansk (on one of which he predicted that far-right ultranationalists would soon seize power in Kyiv in a violent coup). From 2015 to 2017, he was also a frequent guest on some of the most odious propaganda shows on Russian television, including Evening with Vladimir Solovyov and 60 Minutes with Olga Skabeyeva. And on February 24, 2021—a year to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—Filimonov appeared on a Moscow-Kyiv satellite teleconference featuring Kremlin-loyal Russians and pro-Russia Ukrainians, hosted by the Russian propaganda site Ukraina.ru. Filimonov’s main contribution to this dialogue was to lament Zelensky’s pivot toward a more hardline stance toward Russia after promising peace during his campaign.
In fairness, Filimonov sometimes offered mild pro-Ukraine pushback in his appearances on these shows, typically in a way that bothsided the Russia/Ukraine conflict. He defended the Euromaidan as an authentic expression of popular will and not just a bought-and-paid-for Western operation (while also handwaving Russia’s role in fomenting the Donbas insurgency). He cautiously discussed the insurgents’ human rights abuses. He even criticized Russian television’s constant drumbeat of “Nazis and fascists” with regard to Ukraine, albeit in the context of equating such language with the Ukrainian government’s “rhetoric of hate and war”—such as describing the Donbas insurgents as “terrorists” or accusing Russia of conducting a war in Eastern Ukraine. (What’s more, his defense of the Ukrainian leadership against the charge of being Nazis or fascists was that they’re simply “money-grubbers.”)
None of us can judge Filimonov’s motives. One can charitably assume that he has been sincere in his desire for bridge-building, even if it led him to collaborate with some very bad people—from Solovyov and Skabeyeva to Mozgovoi. But surely, his story is incomplete if it doesn’t include the fact that before the full-scale war, he was part of a Russia-friendly minority in Ukraine and, arguably, a collaborator in Russian propaganda.
WHEN I SENT A LINK TO FILIMONOV’S ACCOUNT to Ukrainian journalist Anastasia Stanko and asked for her opinion, Stanko told me in a telephone conversation that the story of war fatigue in Ukraine is a real and important one—but, as she put it, “I don’t understand why this person was chosen to tell it.” She objects, in particular, to Filimonov’s claim that the things he talks about are unsayable in Ukrainian society today because of fear of seeming unpatriotic. Stanko says that while the official “Telemarathon” into which all of Ukraine’s news networks were consolidated under a government umbrella tends to downplay negative views, is it increasingly unpopular and viewed as propaganda; instead, Ukrainians gravitate to online news channels, newspapers, and websites where unfettered speech thrives. As an example, she points to her own site, Slidsvto (“Investigation”), where she just published a long story on serious and damaging morale problems in a Ukrainian army unit where recruits have endured abusive treatment and four soldiers with mental health problems committed suicide. Slidstvo’s other recent content includes two articles on corrupt schemes to help Ukrainian men evade the draft or flee abroad—one of the problems that Filimonov insinuates are shrouded in silence.
The reason Filimonov is featured in the story is simple: The Free Press’s Lukyanova told me in an email that she got to know him while covering the war in Ukraine (which she has done for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and Semafor), and they have continued to talk since then. “His first-person account [published in] the FP was born out of a conversation like that,” Lukyanova wrote. “We spoke for maybe an hour, and he’d complain about the state of war and free speech inside the country. I was fascinated by the whole thing, particularly because you don’t hear that perspective every day here in the US.”
Of course we need to hear diverse viewpoints—perhaps now more than ever, when Ukraine’s future may soon be decided in Washington and American opinions of Ukraine’s fight matter, as do Ukrainian perspectives on whether the war is still worth it. Filimonov may have an interesting story to tell. But it needs to be accurately told. Failing to explain Filimonov’s unusual background, the context of his beliefs, and his record of Russia-friendly commentary is a disservice to readers.
Russian writer Dmitry Bykov, an émigré dissident and passionate supporter of Ukraine, got flagged for saying, on Ukrainian state television, that Ukrainians who feel that “the only good Russian is a dead Russian” are thankfully a minority.
For example, Filimonov suggested that the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists were “building something new” as opposed to trying to prop up a collapsing old system, extolled the spirit of mutual aid supposedly prevalent in Donetsk, and claimed that the Ukrainian guards at territory crossings routinely took bribes while the guards on the Donetsk and Luhansk sides never did. (Color me skeptical.)