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Kyiv, Ukraine – Halyna is ready to abandon his dreams to go home in exchange for peace in the rest of Ukraine.
“I want this nightmare to be finished. I do not want to hear aerial raid sirens almost every night and read people who are dead and people burned in their homes almost every morning,” said the 35 -year -old woman who held her last name because she “does not want to look unat Patriotic”.
“I want peace, even if it means that we can never go home,” she told Al Jazeera.
Halyna is from the southern port of Mariupol, the major Ukrainian city in Russia seized in May 2022 after a three -month seat and attacks that killed thousands of people.
It is one of the 56% of Ukrainians who would accept a “compromise” to put an end to the bloodiest armed conflicts in Europe since 1945, according to a survey published Thursday by the Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and the Socis Center for Social Research, both of Kyiv pollsters.
The “compromise” means that kyiv should accept de facto control of Russia by almost a fifth of the Ukrainian territory.
16.6% of those questioned would accept freezing along the current front lines, and only 12.8% want Kyiv to be changed until it recognized all the land that Russia has entered since 2014.
‘Nothing to come back
The fifth lost in the territory of Ukraine includes Mariupol, where Halyna lived with her 11 -year -old daughter, Alina, and her husband, Serhiy, who was killed in March 2022 by an explosion when she was looking for food in a bombed grocery store.
Halyna and Alina fled three days later with a single bag of clothing, documents and toys after their neighboring neighbors, an elderly couple, agreed to take a look.
It took them three days of waiting for several hours, research and questions which she described as humiliating at the Russian control points to reach the city of Zaporizhzhia controlled by kyiv.
Six days after their escape, their building of nine -story apartments was struck by a Russian bomber.
“I realized that we have nothing to come back,” said Halyna.
The growing preparation for a compromise indicated in the survey reflects a national awareness that even with Western military aid, Ukrainian forces cannot expel the Russians.
“Most of the Ukrainians support negotiations by compromise to end the war,” said Penta -based Kiev -based head of the Penta based on kyiv. “We understand that we cannot count solely on the military way of ending the war.”
‘Ready for a drone to fly’
The war uprooted one in four Ukrainians – 10.6 million people – who became displaced internally or fled abroad, according to the United Nations Refugees Agency.
Many of those whose houses have remained intact and out of the Russian hands are tired of war to the point of physical and mental exhaustion.
“Every night I prepare for a shaheed [an Iranian-designed Russian drone] To fly in my apartment, ”said Al Jazeera Oleksiy Svidirenko, a 51 -year -old bank clerk.
He meticulously checks that all his documents, savings, family photos and hard drives are packed in an emergency bag which is all night next to the front door of his apartment on the fourth floor in a five -story building in the center of kyiv.
His wife and son fled to the Czech Republic in 2022, but Svidirenko – with each Ukrainian man of the age of combat – cannot join them.
He keeps an epidemic mask Covid-19 to protect himself from the dust raised by a possible explosion, has a ready-made flashlight in the event of a power failure and ensures that a pair of thick soles shoes is under his bed in case of glass shards throw the ground.
“It’s my little personal superstition-if all this is ready, I can sleep well,” he said, laughing nervous. “Some of my friends do the same.”
‘Existential shortages’
A psychologist says that the difficulties in wartime face Ukrainians could be better described as “shortages”.
“War has taken us a lot, leaving holes of different sizes in everyday life,” said Al Jazeera Svitland Chunikhina, vice-president of the Association of Political Psychologists, a group of kyiv.
“The greatest shortage is security as well as stability, predictability, justice,” she said. “We all in Ukraine live as disabled people, but our handicap is existential.”
The feeling is exacerbated by the betrayal of the West – real or imaginary.
“Everyone has dropped us – [former US President Barack] Obama, [current US President Donald] Trump, Europe, ”said Halyna.
“Trump is everyone’s worst,” she added. “He made so many promises that he knew he would not hold.”
Before his re -election, Trump undertook to end the war “in 24 hours”, showing his alleged influence with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After months of attempts to start a peace process, Trump seems to have abandoned the idea.
Trump said on Wednesday at a press conference at the NATO summit in Hague that his commitment was “of course, sarcastic”.
For Fesenko, the biggest problem is that Trump now has “no clear position, no clear understanding of how to end war”.
“In Ukraine at the end of last year and at the start of this year, there was a moderate optimism about Trump. Now this mood has disappeared,” he said.
“And I think it’s good. There are no increased expectations about Trump. There is a pragmatic understanding which, most likely, war will not end soon,” he concluded.
Despite the growing fate and gloom of civilians, Ukrainian forces have so far managed to contain the summer offensive of Moscow.
Last week, they prevented a Russian lead in the northern region of Sumy, according to a political analyst who fights in eastern Ukraine.
“We can say that the enemy has started to slip,” wrote Kirill Sazonov on Telegram on Monday.
This year, Russia has occupied around 5,000 m² (1,930 m²), or about 1% of the territory of Ukraine, according to data analysts.
The gains pale compared to the conquest of 120,000 m² (46,332 miles) during the first five weeks of the large -scale invasion in 2022 and the recovery of Ukraine of 50,000 km km (19,305 m²) in the spring of 2022.
