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This winter, after a protracted impasse along the frontlines, the war in Ukraine began a new phase with its own distinctive rhythm. It has been defined in recent days by the dramatic pattern of drone strikes deep inside Russian territory. On most mornings, the world now sees the results of such strikes in news reports and images from Russia: columns of fire rising over a fuel depot in the region of Bryansk, an oil terminal near St. Petersburg, and targets in other Russian towns and regions, from Oryol and Tula to Belgorod.

What the world does not see of these weapons is the way they are deployed, usually in the dead of night at secret bases in Ukraine. They are so closely guarded that, apart from the soldiers who operate them, only a few civilian engineers are usually allowed to observe the launches, taking careful notes and measurements of the way the weapons function, the way the troops use them and any mishaps that take place along the way.

We dont have time to test these things on the firing range, says Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraines Minister of Strategic Industries, who oversees the nations military industry and often goes himself to see its newest weapons on the launchpad. We test them in combat, he tells TIME. So we have to be there, making adjustments and improvements along the way.

Such experiments, conducted with oversight from Kamyshin and his ministry, are likely to define the next stage of this war. On orders from President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainians have begun trying to ease their reliance on Western arms by manufacturing more of their own. Nearly all of the recent strikes against targets in Russia have come not from foreign stockpiles, Kamyshin says, but from Ukrainian factories and clandestine workshops.

Ukraines ability to produce enough arms for its own military will be central to its current strategy for defeating the Russians. As Zelensky put it in a recent interview with the Associated Press: This is the way out.

But, for the strategy to work, Ukraine will need overcome a range of challenges. It will have to marry its old and battered arms industry to advanced weapons designs and capabilities from western allies, especially those of the United States. During his most recent visits to the White House, once in September and again in December, Zelensky asked President Joe Biden not only for financial and military aid but, no less urgently, the licenses Ukraine needs to produce and repair American weapons. Give us these opportunities, he recalled telling Biden after one of these visits. And we will build.

In theory, the plan could work. Since Zelenskys September visit to the Oval Office, TIME has interviewed nearly a dozen current and former officials and executives in Kyiv and Washington to learn what it would take for Ukraine to produce enough weapons to fight the war. On the American side, the collaboration is possible, if hard. Under U.S. law, Biden has the power to grant licenses that would help kick-start domestic Ukrainian weapons production without the approval of the U.S. Congress. Still, the decision would need to go through a byzantine approval process within the U.S. government and, crucially, Ukraine would need billions of dollars in aid to revitalize its weapons industry.

Even harder is the work required in Ukraine. Once an engine of the Soviet war machine, Ukraines military industry has hundreds of factories and tens of thousands of workers at the ready. But they have been pummeled by Russian missile strikes and have atrophied through decades of mismanagement. According to industry insiders, their output during the first year of the invasion was paltry. Among Zelenskys advisers, some now see the industry as Ukraines best hope for defeating the Russians in what has become a war of attrition.

Delivering on that hope has fallen to Kamyshin, among the more recent additions to Zelenskys inner circle. A former investment banker with the look of a bouncer at a heavy metal club, he is seen in Kyiv as one of the Presidents new favorites, a fixture at his side during his recent trips to Western capitals and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Even some of Zelenskys critics give him high marks for his efforts to revive the military industry. If anyone can do it, its Kamyshin, says Aivaras Abromivicius, a former minister in Zelenskys government who tried and failed to reform the defense sector himself in 2019.

The task in front of Kamyshin is huge. Not only will he need to breathe life into Ukraines moribund factoriesin some cases, he will also need to reconfigure them for entirely new purposes. No matter how much we produce in conventional weapons, we cant catch up with Russia, says Kamyshin. We need to use advanced technology to find a new approach. He compared the challenge to the story of David and Goliath playing on repeat, with each new phase of the war obliging Ukraine to find a new slingshot.

Its advances so far have been impressive. Since the invasion, Ukraines engineers have tested new missiles and started mass producing combat drones. Using an old American rocket, the Ukrainians jerry-rigged a system to shoot down Russian aircraft on the cheap. They also started welding hunks of metal into giant rakes to plow through enemy minefields.

None of these innovations has been decisive on the battlefield, where Ukraines top military leaders have declared a virtual stalemate. But the President and his team have wagered that, over time, their shift to domestic production can give them enough of an edge to win. Their biggest challenge in the coming months will be attracting foreign partners to the Ukrainian weapons industry, and securing the licenses needed to build and repair Western arms. Our model used to be: Give it to us, Kamyshin says. Now our model is going to be: Lets make it together.

The Ministry of Strategic Industries did not feel like a natural perch for Kamyshin at first. When Zelensky offered him the position last spring, he tried to turn it down.

Kamyshin had spent the first year of the Russian invasion serving as head of the state railway company, overseeing the shipment of foreign weapons into Ukraine and the evacuation of refugees. He also arranged travel for hundreds of foreign leaders and dignitaries, including President Biden, who traveled to Kyiv by train during the invasion. The stress of the job had nearly burned Kamyshin out, and he asked Zelensky for a few months off last year, to travel around Europe the whole summer, go to America, spend time with my kids. His two boys, ages nine and thirteen, had not seen much of their father since the invasion started. But the President could not wait that long to find a new boss for the defense sector.

Look, I also want to take a break, Kamyshin recalls Zelensky telling him. A week of rest would be an incredible dream. But I cant do it. Ukraine was preparing its forces last spring for the biggest counteroffensive of the war, intending to break through the Russian lines and regain much of its southern territory. Zelensky needed the countrys arms manufacturers to start cranking out weapons as fast as possible, in part to hedge against the risk of a decline in supplies from the West.

In March 2023, Kamyshin relented and, at the age of 38, took his seat in the Presidents war room among Ukraines top generals, diplomats and spies. He looked a little out of place among them. Tall and broad-shouldered, Kamyshin wears a pointy beard and a hairdo borrowed from the warriors of Ukrainian folklore: a tight braid in the back, the sides of his head shaved close. (His sons both wear their hair in the same unusual fashion.) Though he holds no military rank, he tends to go around in an all-black uniform, which resembles a workmans coveralls.

He was dressed this way when we first met in the fall of 2022, during his tenure as the head of the railways. At the time, millions of Ukrainians were suffering through blackouts as Russia launched wave after wave of attacks against the electricity system. Kamyshin and his team were busy preparing for winter, equipping train stations with potbellied stoves and diesel generators so that civilians would have a place to rest, warm up and charge their devices.

During a tour of the station in Kyiv, Kamyshin invited me to inspect a passenger train that a group of workers had just finished cleaning. He walked into one of the sleeper cars, looked around and ran his fingers over a luggage rack. It was covered in dust. Does that look clean to you, he asked one of the elderly managers, who removed his cap and shook his head. Kamyshin then sat the man down for a lecture about the need to do things in a new way.

His style of management, and his manner of speaking, borrows a lot from his early career as a banker and auditor, including at KPMG, a global accounting firm whose corporate mumbo-jumbo he still likes to recite from memory. He talks a lot about following the data. On more than one occasion, he told me the war has forced Ukraines leadership to work under something called the Tetris principle. He explained: All your successes are erased. All your f-ck ups accumulate. In other words, at a time of war, achievements are taken for granted, while mistakes tend to follow you around.

Even so, during his time as railway boss, Kamyshin earned a lot of respect inside and outside the government for keeping the trains running on time. At least on the surface, that job seemed like a useful dry run for his current mission. Both required him to steer a vast bureaucracy whose managers and equipment date largely to the Soviet Union.

But the weapons industry is far more complicated, says Daria Kaleniuk, a leading activist for good governance in Kyiv. Well before Kamyshin took over the railway company, it underwent reforms to help prevent graft and mismanagement. Few of these changes have been implemented in Ukraines military industry. It is the least reformed sector of our economy, Kaleniuk says. It is also the most secretive.

Before Kamyshin took charge, a series of reformers attempted to clean up Ukraines defense sector. Each of them failed. Some blamed a lack of political will at the top. Others pointed to a culture of waste at the bottom. But the fundamental problems with the industry date back to its origins: most of the countrys biggest arms factories were designed and built in the Soviet Union to serve the needs of the Kremlin in Moscow.

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraines military factories had little choice but to continue selling their products to Russia. For more than two decades, the defense sectors of both countries remained interdependent, often working hand in glove. Russia relied on Ukrainian hardware, including jet engines and ballistic missile technology, while Ukraines defense sector relied on its income from these sales to Moscow.

The bonds between them only frayed when Russia launched its first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. That spring and summer, Russian troops occupied the region of Crimea and carved off two separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine. As the Ukrainians fought back, their weapons industry stopped doing business with the Russians. Many of their production lines were forced to shut down as a result, and their incomes plummeted.

Ukraines state arms conglomerate, Ukroboronprom, soon set out to find new partners and customers, especially in the West. We needed to take this post-Soviet behemoth and turn it into a Western type of company, says Denys Gurak, who was still in his 20s when he was put in charge of this effort in the summer of 2014. The job, he says, came by coincidence. He was friends with the new boss at Ukroboronprom; they had gone to business school together, and Gurak was the only one on their team who spoke fluent English.

Over the next few years, he attempted to implement corporate-governance reforms and build relations with some of the biggest arms manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe. Most of the time I felt like Don Quixote, Gurak says. I probably did about 10% of what I set out to do. The main obstructions came not from the West, he says, but from the older managers within the system, many of whom had no interest in adapting to the Western market.

I would call them Russian agents, Gurak says. Even if they were not on the Kremlins payroll, their views aligned with the Soviet ideas of brotherhood between Russia and Ukraine. We have this stupid kind of corruption where people can be influenced indirectly through post-Soviet culture, he says. It doesnt have to be a direct agent, just a corrupt guy in the system, and his actions ultimately benefit Russia.

As a result, new policies handed down from the top faced stiff resistance in the lower ranks, and by 2016 the government all but abandoned its attempts to change the system. The Ukrainian president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, blocked key reforms of the arms industry that year, deeming it too sensitive and too secretive to tamper with.

The decision soon came back to haunt Poroshenko. When he ran for re-election two years later, a massive corruption scandal broke out inside the state weapons conglomerate, dealing a blow to the incumbents popularity. One of his close associates was implicated in a scheme to smuggle military equipment from Russia and sell it at a mark-up to Ukraine. A few months later, Poroshenko lost the race to a comedian named Zelensky.

As a political outsider, Zelensky ran on a promise to fight corruption, and the defense sector was among his top priorities. But in 2019, when reformers in his administration proposed cleaning out the military industry and radically reducing its workforce, Zelensky got cold feet. It was too big, with some 56,000 employees and many towns reliant on its factories. Instead of closing them down, the Zelensky administration built up a new bureaucracy, the Ministry of Strategic Industries, that would oversee the entire defense sector. It promised to create jobs rather than cutting them, and the states attempts to reform the industry then continued to stagnate. Even the full-scale Russian attack did not immediately revive them.

In February 2022, when much of Ukrainian society jumped into action to defend the country, the domestic arms industry continued to sputter, barely producing any artillery shells in the first year of the invasion. A state-owned gunpowder factory went bankrupt in February 2023, weighed down by its debts. The state arms conglomerate, Ukroboronprom, did not even undergo the corporate changes necessary to create a joint venture with a Western firm.

The Presidents office did not have much time to deal with these problems at that point. To fight off the Russians, Ukraine needed supplies of weapons fast, and it would take months to squeeze sufficient firepower out of the states decaying manufacturers. Instead, the armed forces relied on available stockpiles, both their own and those of their allies, who donated tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to help beat the Russians back.

But, over time, these supplies began drying up, leaving wide gaps in the Ukrainian arsenal. One big problem had to do with mine-trawlers, which the Ukrainians needed at the start of their summer counteroffensive to clear a path through enemy defenses. De-mining equipment from the West arrived too slowly through the spring and early summer. But Kamyshin soon realized these machines were not complicated. They looked like metal claws affixed to the front of an armored vehicle, and teams of Ukrainian welders were soon assigned to start making them as fast as possible.

Its not rocket science, Kamyshin told me. All these problems come down to being better organized. Most of the factories he visited were full of workers eager to do their part in the war effort, but their managers often did not understand what the military needs. At one point, Zelensky asked Kamyshin to deal with a backlog of damaged tanks. Ukraine was preparing to send them to Poland to be fixed. But, after a tour of Ukraines tank factories and frontline repair points, Kamyshin realized that, with some support, they were perfectly capable of doing the job.

In June 2023, the director of one of those tank factories, Herman Smetanin, who is 31 and looks even younger, was appointed to lead the state weapons conglomerate, Ukroboronprom. He immediately began pushing through the corporate reforms that several of his predecessors had failed to implement. Within a few months, he had turned the state concern into a corporation, capable of partnering with foreign firms, and he began traveling to the U.S. and Europe to negotiate partnerships.

Its a new era, says Olena Tregub, the head of an independent watchdog of the defense sector. Infighting between Ukrainian arms producers and their government bosses had always hampered reforms and innovation. Now finally they are working as a team, she says. Of course its difficult. Its a new sector for Kamyshin. But hes a very dynamic person, very aggressive in the good sense of the word.

It sounded strange to hear an activist like Tregub talk this way about a senior minister. Her organization, known as NAKO, conducts oversight of the defense sector with funding from foreign grants and donors, and it does not pull punches in criticizing industry officials. Its reports have ended some of their careers. Yet when it came to Kamyshin and Smetanin, no one I spoke to had serious qualms. Kaleniuk, among the most prominent of Ukraines anti-corruption crusaders, told me: I have no evidence that Kamyshin is corrupt. Coming from her, this sounded like high praise.

The challenges, to be sure, are enormous. Kamyshins ministry has been tasked with reforming a gargantuan system of secret facilities in the middle of an invasion, all while Russian missiles batter its factories from above and Ukrainian security services hunt for enemy agents from within. In May 2022, the states main spy agencyannouncedthe arrest of a defense sector employee for urging his colleagues to support the enemys army. In early 2023, an arm of Ukroboronprom saw one of its workerscharged with treasonfor passing military secrets to the Russians.

But all this turmoil can serve as a chance to drive rapid reform, says Abromivicius, who served as acting head of Ukroboronprom at the start of Zelenskys tenure. In a country in transition, personalities do matter, he said. Someone like Kamyshin understands his sense of purpose. He has authority and autonomy. Its very important for him to deliver results fast, because the President likes to rely on people who deliver quick wins. Then he will get the support he needs.

Despite the weight of his responsibility, and the potential consequences if he fails, Kamyshin does not come off as much of a worrier. On numerous occasions, Russia has sought to assassinate key figures in Europes military industry, once attempting to poison an arms dealer in Bulgaria whose factories supplied the Ukrainian army. (Ukraines military intelligence agency, for its part, has also made public threats to assassinate Russian arms manufacturers.) But Kamyshin still prefers to walk around the streets of Kyiv rather than riding in an armored convoy.

One afternoon last fall, he invited me to visit an art installation in Kyiv, and his bodyguard stayed mostly out of sight. The installation featured a phalanx of imitation drones fashioned out of rusty metal, arranged on the floor like a swarm of robotic insects. Above them loomed a gigantic mother-drone, more than ten feet tall, with a mock bomb dangling from its belly. The artist explained that the work was an homage to the drones killing Russians at the front. But Kamyshins mind was elsewhere. We should mass produce these and sell them, he said of the replicas. Then use the money to buy real drones.

His fixation on these weapons comes down to their efficiency. It sounds boring, Kamyshin told me. But theres a formula: Cost to kill. It applies to almost every weapon Ukraine produces. One Stugna missile, for example, kills an average of three enemy soldiers, each at an average price of $4613, Kamyshin says. By comparison, simple drones known as FPVs have a cost-to-kill ratio of around $1650. The disparity led him to a simple conclusion: You have to pump the maximum amount of money you can into drones.

Last year, Ukraine invested around a billion dollars into its domestic drone program, and that figure will more than double in 2024. Roughly two hundred firms in Ukraine now produce drones for the military, ranging from start-ups to large, Soviet-era facilities. In the summer of 2016, one of Ukraines leading aerospace firms unveiled a drone called the Horlytsia, or Turtledove. It had a modest range of about 100 kilometers and could handle reconnaissance and targeting, both of which are critical in an artillery war.

But, when the Russian invasion began in 2022, Ukraine had just one of these drones available, a prototype. Only in the second year of the invasion were they re-engineered to fly much longer distances and put into mass production. They have since been used to strike targets deep inside Russian territory.

At the same time, Ukraine has appealed for more equipment from Western arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. We found a back door, Kamyshin says. Rather than asking for the most advanced technology, he looked for ways to reconfigure weapons that the U.S. no longer plans to use. American warehouses were full of such kit. One useful item was an old version of the Sidewinder missile, first produced in the 1950s to allow fighter jets to shoot enemy planes out of the sky. A joint team of engineers and army technicians from the U.S. and Ukraine rigged them to be fired from the ground, creating a cheap air-defense system out of rockets the Americans might otherwise have thrown away. We have its first flight, Kamyshin says. And it will give my country self-made air defense. During his visit to Davos this month, he announced that these weapons had been used for the first time to shoot down a Russian attack drone.

Still, Zelensky and his team understand the war cannot be won with hand-me-downs. To defeat an enemy as massive and technologically advanced as Russia, Ukraine will need access to Western arms, including highly classified blueprints and maintenance manuals for heavy weaponry. No private firm in the U.S. or Europe can share such secrets without government permission, and Zelensky has been pleading with Biden to grant it.

But here, too, the powers of the White House are limited, particularly when it comes to more advanced technology. We have tight restrictions on what kind of technical know-how can be shared, says Jana del-Cerro, who worked until 2022 at the branch of the State Department that enforces these restrictions.

The U.S. President can try to hurry approval by declaring the request an emergency. But, under U.S. law, it would still need clearance from an alphabet soup of authorities inside the Departments of State, Commerce and Defense, among others. Theres no button anyone can push to fast-track these things, says del-Cerro, now a partner at the law firm Crowell & Moring in Washington.

At this stage of the war, Ukraine does not have the licenses to repair the American weapons it has received, let alone produce them. John Ullrich, an executive at Raytheon Technologies, compares it to giving your friends a car but not allowing them to change the motor oil. Earlier in his career, Ullrich worked on the production of the Javelin missile, a shoulder-fired tank killer that costs roughly a quarter million dollars per shot. The U.S. delivered thousands of them to Ukraine early in the invasion, and they were critical to Russias defeat in the Battle of Kyiv.

But now, Ullrich says, Ukraine needs access to more advanced technology, as well as the money to use it and adapt it to the changing realities on the battlefield. That war will be won in a factory, he told me. Its a war of attrition.

In the middle of December, when we last spoke at length on the phone, Kamyshin had just returned home after a long visit to Washington. The previous night, Russia had launched a barrage of missiles at Kyiv. Ukraines air-defense systems shot them down, but the burning debris rained down over the capital, starting fires, damaging a childrens hospital, and wounding at least 53 people. Several facilities from the military industry sustained damage, and Kamyshin made the rounds to see how quickly they could be repaired.

Throughout the year, he has tried to make weapons factories more resilient to such attacks. Many of Ukraines arms producers are located near the frontlines, where they are vulnerable to Russian artillery fire and aerial bombardment. Instead of moving these factories farther to the west, where their workers and equipment could be more easily protected, Kamyshin decided to duplicate them, setting up multiple production lines in different parts of the country. You pull off a branch, you plant it elsewhere and nurture it, he says. But the trunk keeps growing.

When I asked about the outcome of his trip to Washington, he did not dwell on his meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill, where Republicans were holding up an aid package worth around $60 billion for Ukraine. He focused instead on his talks with the private sector. Top executives from the biggest firms in the U.S. defense industry had come to meet with him and Zelensky in Washington last month. The combined revenue of those companies is bigger than Ukraines entire GDP, says Kamyshin, who sat beside Zelensky at the meeting. They all showed up, and they all wanted to help.

The previous week, dozens of other potential investors came to a landmark forum at the Commerce Department, where Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called on the full might of American industry to help Ukraine win the war. On the sidelines, Kamyshin and his team grabbed every chance to convince U.S. executives of the value of working in Ukraine. Its about reputation, his deputy, Anna Gvozdiar, told me in summarizing one of her arguments. If you are a big defense company, you need to be in Ukraine, because all the eyes of the world are watching this war.

In private meetings, Kamyshin tried to sell Ukraines defense sector as an investors Shangri-La, with a cheap and motivated workforce, flexible regulations, and the ability to test new weapons in combat as soon as they roll off the line. Some companies saw the potential. Aaron Starks, the head of a trade organization called 47G, which represents the aerospace, defense and cyber industries in Utah, signed a cooperation deal with Kamyshin and made a trip to Kyiv to scout opportunities last fall. From a business perspective, Starks told me, Ukraine represents one of the hottest defense technology innovation hubs in the world right now.

But the Western giants of the industry have been slow to take the plunge. The first was Germanys Rheinmetall, which has announcedplans to build a factory in Ukraine, aiming to start production of armored vehicles next year. BAE Systems, the biggest arms manufacturer in the U.K., has opened a representative office in Kyiv, though it is still in the process of staffing it.

The risks can seem daunting. There is no insurance policy against a Russian missile strike in Ukraine, and no way of knowing for sure how the Ukrainians will manage the trade secrets of their foreign partners. To access those secrets, including the blueprints needed to build and maintain new weapons systems, they need more than the U.S. governments permission. They also need their foreign partners to trust Ukraine with those secrets. That kind of trust takes time to build, and Kamyshin is just starting to lay its foundations, one pitch meeting at a time.

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"This is the Way Out": Inside Ukraine's Plan to Arm Itself | TIME - TIME

Ukraines Revolution of Dignity began, according to legend, with a Facebook post. In the fall of 2013, after President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of a deal that would have deepened the countrys relationship with the European Union, the investigative journalist Mustafa Nayyem wrote a post calling on people to gather in Independence Square, in the center of Kyiv. After three months of continuous protests, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ten years later, Independence Square is desolate most days. Kyiv has imposed a midnight curfew. Martial law, in effect since February, 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, forbids mass gatherings. As for Nayyem, he is now the head of the federal agency for reconstruction, which is attempting to rebuild the country as quickly as the Russians are devastating it. On the tenth anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity, this past November, instead of speaking at a rally, Nayyem was scheduled to preside over a different sort of ceremony: the reopening of a bridge that connects Kyiv to the western suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, where, in the first weeks of the war, some of the worst atrocities committed by Russian forces took place.

A few days before the unveiling, I talked with Nayyem in his office. The reconstruction agency occupies part of a stolid late-Soviet government building. Nayyems suite looks as though it was renovated ambitiously but on a budget, with vertical blinds, plastic panelling, and vinyl knockoffs of Le Corbusier couches in the waiting area. On the walls he had hung giant prints of the famous Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photograph and a panoramic view of Manhattan. New York is my favorite city, he explained. And this is as close as Im going to get to it in the foreseeable future.

Nayyem was born in Kabul in 1981, the second year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His mother died three years later, after giving birth to his brother, Masi. When Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, in 1989, Nayyems father, a former government official, moved to Moscow. Two years later, after marrying a Ukrainian woman, he moved the family to Kyiv. Nayyem rose to prominence in his twenties as a crusading journalist, uncovering stories of top-level government graft in Ukraine. Following the Revolution of Dignity, he served in parliament and played a key role in reforming Ukraines notoriously corrupt and violent police force. Before accepting his current job, he was a deputy minister for infrastructure.

The government launched the reconstruction agency last January, with the announcement that eighteen apartment buildings would be restored in Irpin, where an estimated seventy per cent of the civilian infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed. We are all in a rush to give people hope, Nayyem told me. But that obscures the fact that we are a country at war. Our only real goal is to survive. He was about to leave for a gruelling trip, travelling by car to the southern port city of Odesa to look at the damage sustained in recent attacks, and then to liberated territories in the southeast to begin a pilot project in which an entire village is being rebuilt. You go to Kharkiv and realize that a bridge thats been blown up means it takes three extra hours to get from one point to another, Nayyem said. That can mean the difference between life and death.

Nayyems brother, Masi, was injured in combat early in the war, and brought to a hospital in critical condition. The car carrying him travelled over a stretch of highway that was later damaged. It has since been repaired by Nayyems agency. We have to rebuild even if its going to be destroyed again, he said. We have no choice. Its building for the present, not for the future.

A new saying had taken hold in Ukraine: None of us is coming back from this war. People may emigrate or relocate, but the war is here to stay. The saying has a literal meaning, too: of the hundreds of thousands of people who enlisted in the early days of the invasion, only the most severely injured have been granted a discharge. In October, about a hundred protesters defied martial law and gathered in Kyiv to demand a limit on the amount of time a person can be expected to serve. The exact number of people currently on military duty, like the number of casualties and target numbers for conscription, is secret. In August, President Volodymyr Zelensky had fired the heads of all the regional draft offices, so pervasive was corruption in the systemand so high, apparently, the desire to buy ones way out of being conscripted. Nevertheless, officials continue to hand out draft notices. In December, it emerged that the ministry of defense was working on a plan to start drafting Ukrainians living abroad.

Until a few months ago, everyone in Ukraine seemed to know how the war would end: Ukraine would liberate its territory, including Crimea, and this, it was assumed, would burst the Russian propaganda bubble and bring about the collapse of Vladimir Putins regime. But then the long-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive, which began last spring, failed to achieve any meaningful breakthroughs. Russia still holds about twenty per cent of what was previously Ukrainian territory. Now, when I asked Nayyem about the end of the war, he said, Im afraid to think about it. He went on, I dont know what it would mean for the war to be over. I think that in my lifetime there will not be a time when I wont fear that war may start again any minute. Because Russia is not going anywhere.

I heard similar notes of weariness from countless others. What are we fighting forland? Katerina Sergatskova, a prominent journalist who started a safety-training program for members of the media, told me. We say that well keep fighting until the Russian empire falls apart. But its not going to fall apart. Denys Kobzin, a sociologist from Kharkiv who is on active military duty, told me that, before the war, he used to attend classes on how to live in the moment. Now Ive spent almost two years living entirely in the present, he said. It eats up all your energy. You cant dream, you cant immerse yourself in memories, you are always a little bit on. This life of total uncertaintyits like you went out for a run but you dont know how far you are running. Sometimes you have to speed up, but mostly you just need to keep breathing.

In November, the former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who had long tried to help bring about peace negotiations, suggested that NATO might accept a Ukraine that didnt include the territories currently occupied by Russia. Such an arrangement could effectively turn the front line into a border and end the fighting without opening negotiations with the Russians. Nayyem thought the suggestion was reasonableafter all, following the Second World War, West Germany became a NATO member while the East was still occupied by the Soviet Union. You know what was good about the Second World War? Nayyem asked wistfully. It ended!

Cartoon by Amy Kurzweil

As it turned out, Nayyems unveiling ceremony was overshadowed by a different news story. Andriy Odarchenko, a parliament member from Zelenskys party, was detained for allegedly attempting to bribe Nayyem. According to prosecutors, Odarchenko had offered Nayyem an incentive to channel reconstruction funds to a university in Kharkiv that Odarchenko had been selected to head. Nayyem had alerted anti-corruption authorities, who set up a sting. Once it appeared that Odarchenko had secured the funding, Nayyem received about ten thousand dollars in bitcoin as a kickback. Odarchenko was arrested minutes before a scheduled meeting of the parliaments anti-corruption committee, of which he was a member. (He has pleaded innocent.)

Such was the state of Ukraine as it entered its third consecutive winter at war: still battling the demon of corruption, still defiant, yet visibly reduced, palpably tired. Nayyem feared that, if the war went on long enough, Ukraine would become more like Russia: autocratic, corrupt, nihilistic. Russia is Russia because Russia is fighting Nazis, he said, referring to Putins false pretense for the war. And we risk becoming Russia because we are actually fighting Nazis.

It is a commonplace to say that Ukraine is waging a war not only for its survival but for the future of democracy in Europe and beyond. In the meantime, in Ukraine, democracy is largely suspended. According to the regular order of things, Ukraine should have a Presidential election in March. Up until the end of Novembera few weeks before the deadline for scheduling the electionZelenskys office seemed open to having one, but ultimately decided against it. We shouldnt have elections, because elections always create disunity, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defense minister who now advises the government, told me. We need to be unified.

An estimated four to six million Ukrainians are living under Russian occupation. At least four million are living in E.U. countries, a million more are living in Russia, and at least half a million are living elsewhere outside of Ukraine. Another four million have been internally displaced. These figures include a significant number of people who became adults after the war began and arent registered to vote. Elections are a public discussion, Oleksandra Romantsova, the executive director of Ukraines Center for Civil Liberties, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, told me. But a third of the population is connected with the military. Another third is displaced. With so many people excluded from the public discussion, what would an election even mean? There is also a more practical problem, Romantsova said: Elections cause people to congregate, and, when Ukrainians congregate, Russia bombs them.

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Ukraine's Democracy in Darkness - The New Yorker

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IN JULY 2021 Vladimir Putin published an essay with arguments he would later use to justify Russias invasion of Ukraine. It raced through 1,000 years to argue that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, cruelly divided by external forces with an anti-Russian agenda. Mr Putins war is supposed to fix that. There is truth in his claim that Ukraine and Russia are close kin, as the following maps demonstrate.What is nonsense is the assertion that their separation into two countries is the result of some external plot, imposed on the Ukrainians against their wishes.

For Mr Putin the origin of Russian-Ukrainian identity is Kyivan Rus, a confederation of princedoms that lasted from the late 9th to the mid-13th century (see map 1). Its centre was Kyiv, now Ukraines capital. Its rulers were the Rus, Scandinavian Vikings who gradually established dominance over the region and merged with local Slavic tribes. (Rus is the origin of the word Russia.) When it comes to political and cultural tradition, Kyivan Rus is indeed the cradle of Russia and Ukraine, as well as the country now called Belarus. It was a refined European civilisation with roots in the Byzantine empire and its Orthodox Christian religion.

In the mid-11th century, however, Kyivan Rus began to fragment into semi-autonomous principalities (see map 2). These included Galicia-Volhynia, which covered parts of modern Ukraine and Belarus, Novgorod in north-western modern-day Russia, and Vladimir-Suzdal, in western Russia. In 1240 the Mongol empire besieged Kyiv, finally destroying what remained of Kyivan Rus as a single entity.

When the Mongol empire and its successors began to decline in the 143th century, rival polities rose to fill the vacuum. In the east of the region power eventually accumulated in Moscow, leading to the creation of the Grand Principality of Muscovy. To the west, what had become the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania joined forces in 1569 to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In 1648 the Cossacks, settlers on the steppe who amalgamated into disciplined military units, led an uprising against the commonwealth. This led to the formation of their own state, the Hetmanate (see map 3). Many Ukrainians look back to the Hetmanate as the origin of their identity as an independent state. Indeed, the original Cossack lands were often called Ukraine, a Slavic word meaning borderland.

Early Cossack warriors practised a limited form of democracy, a contrast to Muscovys autocratic regime. That Hetmanate came about as an act of resistance to larger neighbouring powers is a history that resonates with Ukrainians today. In the 19th century, the folk memory of the Cossacks state helped inspire the birth of a recognisable form of Ukraines cultural nationalism.

But the Cossack state had a hard time. In 1654, threatened by the Poles as well as the Ottomans to the south, Cossack leaders pledged allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy. A few decades later intellectuals in Kyiv wrote what is believed to be one of the oldest texts outlining the basis of a Slavo-Rossian nation. They hoped to convince the tsar to defend them, not only because of their shared history and Orthodox religion, but also in the name of ethno-national unity.

By the end of the 17th century the Hetmanates territory had split into two: Muscovy took control of the east bank of the Dnieper river, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seized the west. In 1708 Ivan Mazepa, a Cossack leader, led a failed uprising against Tsar Peter the Great. (Russia regards Mazepa as a traitor; in Ukraine he is a hero.) Peter went on to become Russias first emperor in 1721.

In the late 18th century the Russian empire broke up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with help from Austria and Prussia. The Russians also seized territory from what is now southern Ukraine from the Ottomans. This included Crimea, annexed to Russia by Catherine the Great in 1783. She oversaw the final dismantling of the Cossack Hetmanate.

On the eve of the first world war the Russian empire stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic (see map 4).

In 1917, weakened by the war, Russia experienced two revolutions. The first overthrew the Romanov dynasty. The second was the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks. After the first revolution officials in Kyiv founded the Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UPR), a state in union with Russia. After the second, the UPR declared independence. Eventually Lenin took the UPR by force. But the strength of Ukrainian national identity compelled him to create a socialist Ukrainian republic, and to allow the use of the Ukrainian language. In 1922 Ukraine became one of the four founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)or Soviet Union.

Ukraines territory expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Unions non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, signed in 1939, the two countries carved up eastern Europe. In the ensuing fighting, what had been parts of Poland that were settled by Ukrainians were added to Soviet Ukraine. In 1954 the Soviet Union transferred the administration of Crimea from Soviet Russia to Ukraine.

But Ukraine also experienced great suffering. In the 1930s Josef Stalins policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture led to a famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, which killed millions of people. In the mid-20th century Ukraine found itself part of what Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale, later called the bloodlands: territory in which Hitler and Stalin, though enemies, enabled each others crimes against locals. Co-operation between some Ukrainian nationalists and the Nazis during the war is adduced by Mr Putin as evidence for his claim that the Ukraine of today is run by fascists. In 1986, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the worlds worst-ever nuclear accident took place at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The damage, and the ensuing cover-up, heightened Ukrainians anger towards the Kremlin.

In the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, set out to reform the Soviet Union through openness and reformglasnost and perestroika. But eastern Europeans, subject to Soviet control through the framework of the Warsaw Pact, took the opportunity to demand their freedom. In 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, bringing independence to its 15 constituent republics (see map 6). Mr Putin has called this the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.

Ukraine suddenly became home to the worlds third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994 it agreed to denuclearise in exchange for security assurances from America, Britain and the Russian Federation. (Ukraine used this agreement, known as the Budapest memorandum, to ask America and Britain for aid on the eve of Russias invasion in 2022.)

In 2004-05 the Orange revolution highlighted Ukraines democratic ambitions. Thousands protested against a rigged presidential election that gave victory to a pro-Russian candidate. Ukraines democratic resolve was even more visible during the Maidan revolution in 2013-14. This was a reaction to the refusal by Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraines president, who was chummy with Russia, to sign an association agreement (an extensive free-trade deal) with the European Union. Thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets; Mr Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ukraines new government signed the agreement, infuriating Mr Putin.

His response to the Maidan marked Russias first military incursions into independent Ukraine. In 2014 the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine (see map 7). Russias separatist proxiesled by the Russian intelligence officers declared peoples republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. By December 2021, just before Russias full-scale invasion in February 2022, the conflict had killed more than 14,000 people. The war continues.

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A short history of Russia and Ukraine - The Economist

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Its hard to ignore the sense of desperation in Ukraines corridors of power. Nearing two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, authorities in Kyiv maintain their long-standing entreaty to partners in the West: Deliver us more arms, more aid, more political commitments.

President Volodymyr Zelensky toured Western capitals at the end of last year, pleading for support amid growing international fatigue with the conflict and paralysis in U.S. Congress over new supplemental funding for Kyiv. Around the same time, his top general, Valery Zaluzhny, bemoaned the stalemate that had set into place after the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 failed to make strategic headway against Russias deep defensive lines.

U.S. officials and their Western counterparts, as my colleagues reported over the weekend, anticipate a lean year ahead, where Ukraines increasingly exhausted forces focus more on consolidating their defense than chipping away at Russias land-grabs. The Kremlin controls roughly a fifth of Ukraines internationally-recognized territory including Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and a broad sweep of Ukraines southeast. The U.S. view of the course of the conflict undercuts Zelenskys stated ambition of driving Russia out by this October.

Last week, Pentagon officials came empty-handed to a monthly 50-nation coordinating meeting for Ukraine, with future U.S. money for arms and aid snared by domestic politics. On the front lines, reports indicate stocks of ammunition and artillery shells are running low for many Ukrainian units.

We get asked whats our plan, but we need to understand what resources were going to have, Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko told my colleagues. Right now, everything points to the possibility that we will have less than last year, when we tried to do a counteroffensive and it didnt work out. If we will have even less, then its clear what the plan will be. It will be defense.

Looming far away from the battlefield is the political drama in Washington. House Republicans have already stymied the latest tranche of funding that President Biden is trying to allocate for Kyiv. Analysts believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding out for a potential return to power of former president Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential candidate for the November election. Trump may scale back support for Ukraine and take a friendlier view of the Kremlins security concerns in Eastern Europe.

As my colleagues reported, the Biden administration and European allies are working on a longer-term, multilateral plan aimed at warding against this scenario and future-proofing support for Ukraine. That includes pledges of economic and security assistance that stretch into the next decade, and may pave the way for Ukraine to get integrated into Western blocs like the European Union and NATO. Biden is set to unveil the U.S. plank of this strategy in the spring.

The policy holds risks, including political ones, if Ukrainians begin to blame their government for stagnant front lines, my colleagues wrote. Likewise, in Western capitals, officials are keenly aware that their citizens patience with funding Ukraines war is not infinite. Amid the planning, Washington also seems to be readying the argument that, even if Ukraine is not going to regain all of its territory in the near term, it needs significant ongoing assistance to be able to defend itself and become an integral part of the West.

But, in the near term, both the shortfalls on Ukraines front lines and divisions in Washington may cement the fate of the war. While the first half of 2024 may bring few changes in control of Ukrainian territory, the materiel, personnel training, and casualties that each side accrues in the next few months will determine the long-term trajectory of the conflict, wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. The West in fact faces a crucial choice right now: support Ukraine so that its leaders can defend their territory and prepare for a 2025 offensive or cede an irrecoverable advantage to Russia.

The West may have already squandered its best chance to enable Ukraine to fully liberate its territory. In his new book, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraines War of Independence, Wall Street Journal international correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov outlines how Western governments slow-rolled military support to Ukraine out of fear of triggering a possible nuclear-armed escalation with Russia. The United States and its allies have sent Ukraine an unprecedented flow of aid, but critics say the overly careful calibration of that support undermined the Ukrainian war effort.

The United States and its partners held back from supplying Ukraine with Western-made capabilities at a time when they would have had the biggest effect, and prohibited Kyiv from using Western weapons to strike military targets on Russian soil, Trofimov wrote, in an adapted excerpt from his book published in The Washington Post. By the time many of these Western systems did arrive, in the second year of the war, Russia had built up defenses, mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and switched its industries to wartime footing. The best window of opportunity for a clear and quick Ukrainian victory had disappeared.

Other experts arent so sure, and contend that the Biden administration had a responsibility to avoid a spiraling confrontation with Russia. More aid, sooner, would have been better but theres no guarantee it would have brought a decisive Ukrainian victory, wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands. The best guarantee of that outcome would have been threatening direct military intervention, a strategy that virtually no one wanted to pursue because the risks were so obvious and, potentially, so severe. Indeed, it would have required Biden to more aggressively cross Russias red lines at the very moment when uncertainty about Putins response was at its peak.

Instead, Ukrainians and their boosters lament what could have been after Ukrainian forces surprised virtually everyone in repulsing Russias initial offensive on Kyiv and defiantly standing their ground in the early months of the war. He opened his mouth like a python and thought that were just another bunny, Zelensky told Trofimov in a 2022 interview, referring to Putin. But were not a bunny and it turned out that he cant swallow us and is actually at risk of getting torn apart himself.

Russia, though, has also stood its ground, withstood international sanctions and is preparing for fresh offensives in Ukraine, on top of its incessant, indiscriminate missile barrages into Ukrainian cities. Kyiv knows its ability to resist hinges on foreign backing. We wouldnt survive without U.S. support, its a real fact, Zelensky said in a television interview this month.

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Analysis | Ukraine's hopes for victory over Russia are slipping away - The Washington Post

Kyiv currently uses what money it can raise domestically to run its own arms industry, pay its soldiers and other security personnel, and protect pensioners and the internally displaced. Western loans and grants cover outlays on the procurement and maintenance of foreign arms, as well as essentialsocial osts, such as salaries for public servants, and medical and educational workers.The government is planning for $37 billion in financial aid this year that would all-but cover a budget deficit estimated at $39 billion.

Western backers have provided some $73.6 billion in financial aid since Russia invaded in February 2022, according tocalculationsfrom the Center for Economic Strategy in Kyiv. Through the International Monetary Fund, they expect to provide a total of $122 billion between 2023-2027.

But the flow of Western money has slowed to a trickle in recent months, as conflict in the Middle East, the onset of election year in the U.S. and a grinding economic slowdown have all pushed the biggest war in Europe in 80 years down the news agenda. So far this month, Ukraine has received no official financial aid at all.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and SlovakiasRobert Ficohavebothresistedproviding any more aid to Ukraine from the EU budget,arguingthat the funding should be divided into four tranches, eachblockableat any time.Orban in particular is now facing increasedpressureto drop his resistance.

In the U.S., meanwhile,financial aid to Ukraine has become a hostage in thefight betweenRepublicans and Democratsover border policy. Despite President Joe Bidenssupport, House of RepresentativesSpeaker Mike Johnsonhasdemandedthat the White House explain its end goal in Ukraine before votingon new aid to Kyiv.

And while the fights in Washington and Brussels play out,Kyivisholdingits breathinsilence, hoping not tohurtits chancesof getting crucial support.

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Ukraine hopes to avoid economic doomsday of not getting Western financial aid - POLITICO Europe