Zelensky Pushes Ukraine ‘Victory Plan,’ but Frontline Troops Stare at Defeat

On a visit to the U.S. last week, Volodymyr Zelensky gave the hard sell to his “Victory Plan” for Ukraine. In meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and an awkward encounter with former President Donald Trump, the Ukrainian leader insisted his country could still–with Western help–emerge victorious in its long-running war with Russia.

Zelensky is yet to share details of the plan with the Ukrainian people, although he is promising to do that in the near future, but on the front lines of the conflict—where Kyiv’s forces have been drawn into a costly war of attrition against the numerically superior Russian forces—victory seems to be a distant hope.

After two and a half years of war, soldiers are tired. The same soldiers who gave Vladimir Putin’s forces a bloody nose after the February 2022 invasion, and pushed the invaders from Kyiv and Kharkiv, say they are under-equipped and complain that they are being ordered to carry out impossible missions as Kyiv struggles to supply the military with new recruits and acquire more Western weapons to ward off Russian advances.

With little training and battleground conditions far removed from what they signed up for at the beginning of the war, the men are sent on what they describe as suicide missions: They are told to get behind enemy lines to launch attacks, yet are not given the weaponry to do so successfully.

The unrealistic tactics have led some entire battalions to refuse orders from their higher-ups, creating an internal conflict that makes it increasingly difficult for Ukraine to hold off Russia’s summer offensive. Soldiers who spoke to the Daily Beast, on condition of anonymity, said that if Ukraine does not change its methods, it is Russia that will end up victorious. In the frontline chaos, they say, Ukrainian soldiers are accidentally shooting at one another; some commanders are members of organized crime groups, using the war for their own business gains.

In the aftermath of Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last month, one soldier with whom the Daily Beast has been in contact over the course of the summer said that the opening of the new front had drawn attention away to corruption scandals faced by Kyiv’s military. Additionally, some soldiers feel that they would rather accept defeat and return home rather than continue fighting in a never-ending war that they cannot escape. The soldier, who asked to be referred to only as “Eddie” and who has fought across key battlegrounds with the 206th Territorial Defense battalion, said it was important the Daily Beast tell his story, believing it could help save lives, and possibly ignite change in the war.

Ukraine’s military has fought gallantly against an enemy far larger than itself since the Russian invasion of February 2022; many of its soldiers have been on the front lines since the beginning. However, they have been met with frequent setbacks over the last few months, which have many of them nervous that Kyiv faces longer-term defeat.

Late last year, the U.S. Congress essentially cut off all new military aid to Ukraine after right-wing Republicans, backed by Trump, decided to make political capital from the multi-billion flow of aid and weaponry. The lack of aid carried on well into 2024, and Ukraine’s military felt it starkly.

It’s virtually impossible to calculate with any degree of accuracy how many Ukrainian soldiers have been been killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion of February 2022, although losses on the Russian side are thought to have been at least four times higher.

Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed so far, a figure that even Kyiv’s closest allies reckon to be an understatement. As far back as August 2023, U.S. officials put the likely death toll on the Ukrainian side at 70,000, with 120,000 injured (although the likely Russian casualty figures are much higher still). In the last few months, says Eddie, his battalion has had 40 soldiers killed, but he says “there are almost no healthy people left in the battalion” out of more than 320 men.

Eddie, 34, is from Kyiv, and took up arms with the territorial defense shortly after Russia’s invasion began. Kyiv was the focal point of the Kremlin’s war plans: Putin’s generals believed they could capture the capital city in a matter of days, and the rest of the country would simply crumble. Eddie did not have military training when he joined the territorial defense. Still, he viewed joining it as a heroic and patriotic act that he could perform for his country, risking his life for the greater good of all Ukrainians.

As a member of territorial defense, Eddie thought his work would be solely tied to pushing Russian forces out of the Kyiv region. It was supposed to be a less intense position in the war than the men fighting in the eastern Donbas region or the southern front. Eddie was given no military training beforehand. Instead, he was sent directly to the Kyiv front and aided in the push to get Russians out of the Kyiv area.

When Russia was pushed out of Kyiv at the end of March 2022, Eddie felt a sense of accomplishment. “I felt great,” he recalls. “It was the first good news after the invasion. It was a light of hope that we will finally be able to [be] free from the shackles of Russian oppression after centuries.”

After Kyiv was secured, Eddie and his battalion were shuffled around various hotspots of the war, fighting in the eventual liberation of the southern city of Kherson and Lyman and Izium in the East. He has seen some of Ukraine’s greatest accomplishments but also its most significant losses.

While witnessing the liberation and fall of Ukrainian territory, Eddie said that he feels he needs to have adequate training to carry out some of his assignments and, at times, that his work is different from what he initially signed up for.

As the war dragged on, Eddie said that he and his battalion had been overworked and exhausted—they were supposed to be pulled out of rotation every 30 to 45 days and have a rest and recuperation before returning to the front. But Eddie said they were stuck without rotation for eight months with no break as Ukraine struggled to find new recruits and ample weapons supplies.

Ukraine has been so desperate for new soldiers this year that it has lowered the enlistment age from 27 to 25, allowed prisoners to join the ranks, and stopped fighting-age men on the streets to check their military papers before sending them to the recruitment center.

For the first nearly two years of war, Ukraine’s military was led by commander-in-chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, whose leadership was much admired by the soldiers under his command. After falling out with Zelensky on the future course of the war, Zaluzhnyi was replaced in February by Oleksandr Syrskyi, whom Eddie and his comrades blame for much of the difficulties faced by his battalion and others over the past six months.

Eddie complains that most men still do not receive adequate military training before they are sent to the front lines. Two and a half years into being a soldier, Eddie said that he does not feel that he does not have the skills that his commanders are now demanding from him.

For eight and a half months, Eddie and his battalion shifted around various front lines in Donetsk, where, the soldier said, “We managed”—despite harsh conditions. In March, they were granted rest and recuperation because of the amount of killed and wounded they had. “We thought finally we would have some rest, that we will be able to repair our vehicles, deal with health issues of personnel, and go on vacations. But R&R lasted only for one and a half months. Not everybody was able to go on vacation,” he said.

Eddie managed to take a vacation, but a fellow soldier in his battalion who asked to be referred to as “Bruce” told the Daily Beast he had “no relaxation and recovery as such because we were also fulfilling the tasks assigned to protect the border in [Kyiv] area. I still conducted a number of training sessions.”

“The problem is more that we were supposed to get more people for the unit, but we did not. There is a catastrophic shortage of people, which overloads the soldiers,” said Bruce, adding that the lack of people is not solely the problem of his battalion but of Ukraine’s entire military.

After returning to Donbas, Eddie’s battalion joined a new brigade for his current deployment, and he said, “Since day one, we’ve noticed a total mess in the organization of defense management and communications. There was a case when guys from [brigade] just shot at other guys from [brigade].”

Eddie added that his brigade’s commander “started issuing almost suicidal tasks to our battalions, sending people for assaults without any artillery, aerial, armor, or any kind of support.”

“Nine months of intense fighting and then a ridiculous six weeks of R&R and then back to the front line in one of the hottest directions is too much for a small battalion. Our vehicles are in bad shape, and not to mention that dealing with health issues, recruiting new guys and training wasn’t even a thing. We’ve had zero [new] training,” said Eddie.

When Eddie spoke to the Beast this summer, he said, “Just right now, three guys died, and one sustained heavy wounds because they never got the promised artillery support during an assault. They tasked four people with AK-47s and nothing else,” to fight at one position. According to Eddie, his battalion’s motor battery complains of receiving about 15 artillery shells a day, while the Russians are shooting hundreds or even thousands.

“Now we’ve lost more men [in two months] than we’ve lost since the beginning: the defense of Kyiv, Kherson campaign, Vovchansk, Bakhmut, Siversk-Soledar, and Mar’yinka combined. Officers (company commanders, platoon commanders), sergeants (combat medics, squad commanders), and soldiers are dead or heavily wounded and fighting for their lives in a hospital.”

In early July, an outspoken commander in Eddie’s battalion, Roman Kulyk, posted on X about the overwhelming situation on the front lines, saying that his soldiers had refused to carry out a “global suicidal task” that they were given and did another route instead. “It is a simple axiom of war that senior commanders are generally unable [or] refuse to objectively assess the capabilities of their subordinate personnel…The fact that these people have been physically and psychologically worn out by the years of the Great War, where there is a total lack of means and ammunition to support the infantry–all this is stupidly ignored.”

The commander said that when he and other high-ups voice their concerns about the war, they are being ignored. “How many soldiers have died because of such stupidity, hypocrisy, unwillingness to exert effort to improve the chances of our people to survive?” he said. However, Eddie said that the commander was discharged due to corruption in a city in western Ukraine before the war.

Eddie says the new brigade his battalion have been assigned to, the 41st, lack professionalism and do not care about the well-being of their soldiers. In one instance, Eddie said that he was listening to his new brigade’s radio when medics were evacuating wounded soldiers. “At some point, I hear a voice of one of the company’s commanders–’ Turn that fucking truck with wounded back and drop them near positions’ If I find this guy, I will kill him. No questions asked,” said Eddie.

During the attack, Bruce said, “I saw the enemy moving freely in the direction of the likely offensive precisely because our brigade did not organize a defense in the direction of the offensive. They did not even mine it. It was close to our [line of defense], so the enemy eventually got the opportunity to surround some of our positions.”

At the end of July, Eddie and Bruce updated the Daily Beast on their battalion’s conditions. They had been pulled out of their work with the 41st and had moved to the front lines of Donbas, where Russians have ground out victories to capture towns such as Niu York. In his latest location, he shared that there is a “total incompetence of higher command, inability to see the situation, therefore idiotic inefficiency of their orders, tragic and senseless losses from our side, and advancement of the enemy.” When asked about the future of the war and whether Ukraine will lose, Eddie said, “In general, if this trend continues, we will lose, of course. It is a really high probability.”