Ukraine stopped waiting for the war to end

Foreign governments tend to discuss conflict with a grammar of defined periods. Ceasefires, reconstruction, elections, and peacekeeping all have defined boundaries that follow from a definitive moment when time goes from “war” to “postwar”. In Ukraine, the idea of “postwar” has become almost impossible to imagine.

After 12 years – a third of Ukraine’s existence as an independent country – fighting an invading Russian army, Ukrainians are not planning for a peaceful postwar moment but rather a different kind of insecurity. This has huge consequences for domestic politics, Ukraine’s appetite for compromise, and the kind of security architecture that its partners will have to offer.

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the conflict felt like an emergency. But that kind of war has settled into something new.

Away from the front lines, life in much of Ukraine appears mostly normal on days without a major Russian air strike. The war has stopped feeling like an emergency with an endpoint, but instead the atmosphere in which politics now has to happen. There is an absence of the future tense in those discussions.

Earlier this month, I sat with a Ukrainian journalist who regularly meets with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other senior Ukrainian politicians. When I asked him who was in the running to be the next president, he laughed and said that even asking that question is pointless.

Nearly half of Ukrainians do not expect the war to end before 2027 (Opens in new window). Large majorities (Opens in new window) reject a peace deal that trades territory or future military capacity for a settlement that they feel merely freezes a conflict in place (Opens in new window) rather than gives them anything that looks like security.

What looks on the outside to be refusal comes from experience. Older Ukrainians describe the 2014 Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea as a failure of inheritance. There is a sense of shame that acquiescence did not spare Ukraine a larger war – it just made the next one easier for Russia to imagine.

The Budapest Memorandum has now become a live topic among the sort of crowd who discuss geopolitics at house parties that end promptly before the midnight curfew. Under the 1994 agreement (Opens in new window), Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited after the Soviet collapse in exchange for the promise of its independence. At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal, behind only Russia and the United States. It seemed like a reasonable cost.

Perhaps not anymore.

There is no serious proposal for Ukraine to start building its own nuclear weapons right now, but the discussion reflects the collapse in Ukrainian faith (Opens in new window) in security guarantees offered by either the West or by Russia. Domestic politics cannot move forward until some version of a political future becomes imaginable. There is no appetite for elections right now (Opens in new window), knowing that a fifth of the country is under Russian occupation, and any election would almost certainly be attacked and meddled with by Russia.

There are personalities and possible presidential contenders, but the war itself will dictate how the elections will go. As that journalist put it to me, if Ukrainian tanks rolled into Red Square, Zelenskyy will stay in power for as long as he likes. If the war ends in a long sigh and the lingering fear of another invasion, the political aperture becomes much wider.

Politics in Ukraine have rarely had stable parties with their own identity and lifeforce. Instead, parties spring up as mechanisms for individuals running for president, who then ask the public for support in the parliament based on their own position.

The Western diplomatic apparatus is trained to think of these conflicts in phases. Aid should be provided now, reconstruction will come later. Guarantees are to be negotiated that will take effect with a solid ceasefire. But Ukraine is trying to tell the world that there is no real end to this conflict. Planning needs to account for durable insecurity instead.

The Ukrainian defence industry has set itself up well for this possibility. The new drone economy offers a path to defence industrial integration and economic resilience while the war still continues. The West should focus on security guarantees credible enough to reshape Russian calculations of another invasion rather than trying to reassure Ukrainians that there will not be another one.

Ukraine is not a country without a future. It is a country whose future is being built without confidence in peace. There is a danger in conversations that mistake a pause in fighting for the end of a war.

Europeans at the time did not realise that they were living in what we now call the Hundred Years War. They experienced it as different wars happening around them all the time, sometimes with years in between. Ukraine understands that it cannot end this war without a guarantee that another 88 years of war will not follow.

For Ukraine, the question may not be what comes after the war, but what kind of democracy can survive when “postwar” never quite arrives.