On 8 September the The Spectator published an editorial bluntly titled “Ukraine is losing the war”. Days earlier, senior Ukrainian figures including former Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and the head of President Zelensky’s office, Kyrylo Budanov, had voiced similar assessments. At first glance the diagnosis appears straightforward. Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign against Russian infrastructure has failed to deliver decisive results. The summer offensive on the southern front, repeatedly billed as crucial, has effectively collapsed. Retaliatory Russian strikes on ports, logistics hubs, energy facilities and transport networks have exposed the exhaustion of Ukrainian air defences, which remain wholly dependent on dwindling American supplies and can now intercept only a fraction of incoming ballistic missiles.
The asymmetry is stark. Ukrainian drone and occasional cruise-missile attacks have caused disruption in Russia – temporary fuel shortages and fires at warehouses – yet the scale is incomparable. Estimates suggest Ukraine has disabled roughly 3 per cent of Russian warehouse capacity; Russia has knocked out between 30 and 60 per cent of Ukraine’s. Ukrainian analysts themselves concede that strikes on Odessa’s ports have damaged fuel logistics far more severely than Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. Diesel prices in Ukraine have exceeded 100 hryvnias – nearly three times the Russian level – and fuel rationing has been introduced for the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the first time. Grain exports by sea have been effectively halted, stripping the budget of a vital revenue stream. Retail businesses are shutting down in large numbers, hollowing out what remains of the civilian economy.
These are serious setbacks. Yet they remain, in a sense, manageable symptoms. A gaping hole of tens of billions of dollars in the Ukrainian budget will be filled, however reluctantly, by European taxpayers. Civilians will endure another harsh winter. What remains of industry and energy infrastructure will continue to be pounded. Entrepreneurs who once supported the regime because their fate was tied to it are now being abandoned. The real crisis lies deeper.
The central tension inside Ukraine is no longer between army and enemy, but between the state and its own people. Forced mobilisation through the Territorial Centres of Recruitment (TCRs) has produced a smouldering civil conflict. Men are dragged from streets, workplaces and homes. Resistance is widespread and increasingly violent. Across the country, TCR officers have been attacked with knives, vehicles and firearms. In one recent case in the Rivne region a deserter opened fire on a TCR vehicle with an automatic weapon, wounding personnel. Similar incidents have occurred in Odesa, Dnipro, Lviv and elsewhere. The pattern is systemic: over 600 attacks on recruitment centres have been recorded since the full-scale invasion began.
In Kyiv itself the rot has become visible at the highest levels. On 2 September a gunfight erupted in the Bereznyaky district between officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the military intelligence directorate (HUR). Residents were woken by gunfire; at least three people were wounded and blood was left on the pavement. The clash reportedly arose during an SBU operation involving a Russian volunteer fighting under HUR command. President Zelensky called the episode “absolutely disgraceful” and demanded accountability, yet the spectacle of Ukraine’s own security agencies exchanging fire in the capital speaks volumes. When the organs of the state turn their weapons on one another in the middle of a war, the claim to national unity rings hollow.
Compounding the violence is the haemorrhage of manpower through desertion. Official Ukrainian figures show more than 200,000 servicemen listed as absent without leave. Criminal proceedings for unauthorised abandonment of unit and desertion have exceeded 310,000 since 2022, with a sharp acceleration in 2025 – more than 160,000 AWOL cases in the first ten months of that year alone, and a record 21,600 in a single month. Independent estimates and Russian claims put the cumulative figure of those who have left the ranks far higher. New recruits desert at alarming rates. The front, stretching some 1,500 kilometres, cannot be held indefinitely by a force that is both bleeding men and losing the consent of the population it claims to defend.
Massive corruption has accelerated the alienation. Audits obtained by Western media reveal that Ukraine lost at least $1.2 billion in 2024 alone to fraud, waste and mismanagement in defence procurement. Seven of the country’s ten largest military contractors continued to receive contracts despite open criminal investigations, failed deliveries or the arrest of executives. The Pavlohrad Chemical Plant supplied hundreds of thousands of defective mortar rounds – many with faulty fuses or propellant – while its director faced fraud charges involving tens of millions of dollars. The Energoatom scandal exposed a $100 million kickback scheme involving associates close to the presidential circle; money-laundering networks linked to the President’s Office have been used to post bail for implicated officials. The prosecutor general was recently forced from office amid fresh corruption allegations. Soldiers and civilians who donate from their own pockets watch officials and contractors enrich themselves while equipment fails and the front stagnates.
The result is a growing disconnect between the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society. As the civilian economy contracts, the military sector offers no compensating opportunities – there is no money for expansion and fewer men willing to die. Bankrupt entrepreneurs, an impoverished middle class and the unemployed increasingly view the state itself, not merely its recruitment officers, as the adversary. A state severed from society becomes, in essence, a military organisation sustained by external subsidy. History offers precedents; the most recent is ISIS. Such an organisation cannot indefinitely hold a vast front line. There are no historical examples of success under those conditions.
This detachment did not begin yesterday. It began when Ukrainian authorities subordinated the interests of their own population to those of their Western sponsors. As winter approaches, Ukraine again stands at a crossroads and appears once more to choose the path of continued war – a path onto which it is being pushed by Europe’s anti-Russia coalition. That is why American envoys left Kyiv empty-handed. The war will continue, first until the Kyiv regime is completely severed from the society it claims to represent, and then until that regime is destroyed.
Ukraine today functions as a gangster dictatorship: a regime that rules by forced conscription, suppresses internal dissent with violence, and tolerates industrial-scale theft while its people suffer. It is kept fighting not by the genuine will of its citizens but by globalist powers, above all the European Union and its compliant satellite Britain. Their aim is not the flourishing of Ukraine but the strategic weakening and ultimate destruction of Russia. The longer this arrangement persists, the clearer the outcome becomes: the Ukrainian state will consume what remains of Ukrainian society in the service of a foreign agenda, until both are broken.
(UKR)
