Russian troops are war-weary, but want to conquer more of Ukraine to avoid future ‘struggle’

BERLIN — In the diplomatic maneuvering over the war in Ukraine, many Ukrainians and their European allies have accused President Donald Trump of offering the Kremlin too many concessions to secure a quick peace deal.

Things look very different from Russia’s bunkers and military hospitals. To many Russian soldiers and their nationalist supporters, the peace proposals from Washington amount to far too little.

In interviews, 11 Russian soldiers who are fighting or have fought in Ukraine expressed deep scepticism of diplomatic efforts that on Friday produced the first direct peace talks in three years, but were brief and yielded little.

Speaking by telephone, the soldiers said they rejected an unconditional ceasefire proposed by Ukraine, adding that Russian forces should keep fighting at least until they conquer all of the four southern and eastern Ukrainian regions claimed, but only partly controlled, by the Kremlin.

“We’re all tired, we want to go home. But we want to take all of the regions, so that we don’t have to struggle for them in the future,” said Sergei, a drafted Russian soldier fighting in the eastern Donetsk region, referring to the annexed territory.

“Otherwise, have all the guys died in vain?”

The interviews are a rare window into Russian military morale, underlining the domestic challenges Russian President Vladimir Putin would face in ending the war on terms that fall short of his maximalist goals.

The soldiers’ demands also suggest that Mr Putin’s hasty annexation of four Ukrainian regions early in the war may have limited his current options in negotiations because a significant part of the population would view anything less as a defeat.

The New York Times verified identities of the soldiers through social media and personal documents, but is withholding their last names to protect them against retribution.

The soldiers, who have fought in different units and different areas, spoke with deep bitterness about their country’s officials and civilians, whom they accuse of benefiting from the war while ignoring front-line hardships.

Their comments point to the difficulties Russia would face after any peace deal in integrating servicemen back into civilian life, and in moving the wartime economy back onto a civilian footing.

“Do you understand what it means for a country to have a million people who have been trained to kill without fear of blood?” said Dmitry, who fought in Ukraine for a Russian paramilitary unit until October.

“A million angry killers is a pretty serious problem if they will view our rulers as men who are not on their side.”

Some of the interviewed soldiers have struggled to reconcile their personal desire for peace, and exhaustion with the war, with a need to make sense of their personal sacrifices through a victorious outcome for Russia.

Although both militaries closely guard their casualty figures, independent researchers estimate that a total of more than 1 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died or been seriously injured.

“I’m in the middle of all this mess, and, honestly speaking, I am tired of it,” said a drafted Russian soldier, also named Dmitry, who remains in uniform.

“I have no more desire to keep stewing in this soup.”

He and Sergei were among the 300,000 Russian men who were hastily called up by Mr Putin in late 2022 to halt a surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive that year. The drafted men helped the Russian army stabilise the front and regain the initiative.

Those who survived have been kept indefinitely on the front lines. The Russian military has also indefinitely extended all service contracts signed by volunteers to boost its ranks.

This means that a peace deal, and eventual demobilisation, offers the vast majority of Russian front-line soldiers the only realistic chance of returning home soon, alive and in one piece.

In interviews, soldiers complained of lack of leave, corruption among superiors and the indifference of their compatriots. Some of the soldiers accused their country’s military command and businesspeople of opposing a peace deal because they are benefiting from the wartime public spending boom.

“Someone sent me a video recently: girls, boys are dancing, hanging out in bars, partying until the morning. Meanwhile, there’s a war going on,” said Andrei, a volunteer Russian soldier in Donetsk.

“Everyone has forgotten about us. We have long ago stopped being heroes to anyone.”

Such resentment has made control of the contested territories, long considered by analysts a bargaining chip amid Russia and Ukraine’s deeper disagreements, a nonnegotiable war aim for many Russian servicemen and their supporters.

“We have shown our strength. The whole world is fighting against us, and they are not getting very far,” said Yevgeniy, a Russian contract soldier who fought in Ukraine until December 2023.

“I don’t want to see any concessions because I have seen the price of every fistful of land.”

Soon after invading Ukraine, the Kremlin conducted sham referendums in the four Ukrainian provinces where the bulk of the fighting took place, purportedly showing overwhelming support for joining Russia, and annexed them soon after.

After three years of fighting, however, Russian forces have almost complete control of only one of them, Luhansk. In the other three regions — Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — Russia controls 65 per cent to 75 per cent of the territory.

Through much of the war, the Ukrainian government categorically rejected ceding land to Russia, demanding a return to the country’s internationally recognised borders, and insisting on security guarantees before agreeing to a truce. In recent months, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has softened his position, accepting a proposed ceasefire without security guarantees, suggesting he would accept at least a temporary loss of the territory already under Russian occupation.

This proposal to effectively freeze the conflict along the current front line is seen by many in Ukraine and the West as a major concession to the Kremlin, abandoning millions of Ukrainian citizens to life under occupation and, they fear, legitimizing and rewarding Russian aggression.

Interviews with the soldiers and Russian opinion surveys show that such a truce would also fail to satisfy a large part of Russian society. Years of war propaganda and steady, if slow, battlefield gains, have convinced many Russians that their country is fighting an existential conflict against the West, which will not end until Ukrainian capitulation.

“If there’s no ceasefire now, we need to keep going until the end,” said Nikolai, a Russian soldier in Ukraine. “Because if we don’t, sooner or later — in five years or in 10 — there will be a war again.”

Ukraine and its supporters have voiced the same fear, claiming that a peace deal without Western security guarantees for Ukraine would lead to a new Russian invasion in the future.

From the outset, Mr Putin has said his invasion aims were to “demilitarise and de-nazify” Ukraine, which implies removing the democratically elected government in Kyiv, the capital; preventing Ukraine from ever joining the NATO alliance; and protecting Ukraine’s Russian speakers, who the Kremlin says, falsely, faced genocide.

A survey conducted in Russia in mid-April by an independent polling company, Chronicles, found that nearly half the respondents said they would not support a peace deal that falls short of those initial goals. Such polls show the difficulty that Mr Putin would face in presenting to Russian society the current status quo in Ukraine as a victory.

Few in Russia expect Mr Putin, who wields absolute power, to pay an immediate political cost for any peace deal. His control of the country’s media would allow him to present any outcome as a success, at least at first. But an unconvincing victory could eventually bubble up into the kind of discontent that fuelled the Wagner paramilitary force mutiny in 2023.

Kremlin officials will most likely remember the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 after an inconclusive war, which angered many veterans and contributed to the collapse of the Communist state.

An underwhelming Russian military victory in the breakaway region of Chechnya bred public discontent that helped bring Mr Putin to power in 1999.

“Of course I want a ceasefire because even a bad peace is better than a good war,” said Dmitry, the former paramilitary soldier. “But we have also taken such a large step forward, that we cannot stop now.”

“Otherwise, is it all a game? Has Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin played a little game, killed a million people, and all is OK?” he said.

“This would not be such a good government, I think,” he added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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