A Brewing ‘Crisis of Faith’ Threatens the Unthinkable in Putin’s War

KYIV—Peremoga—or victory—has become the national toast of Ukraine, whether it’s raising a glass of vodka to it, praying for it, or wishing someone peremoga on their birthday.

For many Ukrainians, it’s also increasingly clear that the West does not share their taste for all-out victory. Avoiding a crushing defeat at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, yes, but Kyiv is growing frustrated that Europe and the U.S. are stopping short of helping them secure their cherished peremoga!

“The West does not have a plan for Russia’s defeat,” says Daria Kaleniuk, who leads the International Center for Ukraine’s Victory. “Their fear causes the death of our children.”

The frustration with the West’s pessimism about defeating Russia—coupled with delays in military aid—is shared by many public officials, military, leaders, and ordinary people in Ukraine, where 97 percent of the population believe their country has a real shot at winning.

International military aid is flowing in, but Kyiv says it pays a high price for delays and hesitations from the West in providing modern weaponry, aircraft, and long-range missiles to Ukraine.

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“It is a question of time, whether they give us 50 tanks a month or 200 tanks a month, the same goes for missiles and everything else. The issue is about the time frame for us, of filling up our resources, the speed of our training and so on,” government adviser and former Deputy Interior Minister Anton Geraschenko told The Daily Beast in an interview on Wednesday. “We need the victory as soon as possible, our resources of weapons and people should be fulfilled much quicker.”

One of Ukraine’s top corruption fighters, Daria Kaleniuk, now leads the International Center of Ukraine’s Victory, campaigning around the European Union and in theUnited States.

“To help millions of our people, who lost their homes we demand the confiscation of the $320 billion of Russia’s reserves from the Western banks but we hear back: ‘We are thinking about the legal way to do that,” Kaleniuk told The Daily Beast earlier this week. “Biden tells us he will support Ukraine for as long as it takes; meantime, our soldiers die, our economy collapses. We want Russia to pay for this war and if you guys are holding their assets, confiscate them. This is an extraordinary situation; a country that sits in the UN Security Council is simply commiting genocide.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky representative for Crimea, Tamila Akuyeva, told The Daily Beast that she often hears pessimistic views from the West about Ukraine’s victory.

“‘You must understand,’ they tell me, ‘Crimea is a different story, it would be impossible to win Crimea back, the fight will be too bloody,’” said Akuyeva. “They tell us it’s too hopeless but we say we are definitely bringing Crimea and all Ukraine’s territories home. The majority of our people want that.” She added that she thinks Western officials need to make a stronger push for a plan to force Russia to “compensate its victims in Georgia, Moldova, and especially in Ukraine right away."

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba recently advised Ukrainians not to pay attention to Western media coverage about Ukraine’s potential failures in its incoming counteroffensive battles.

“The same experts and media doubted on the eve of Feb. 24 that Ukraine would withstand the blows of Russia. Skeptics said ‘nope’ and optimists gave us a week,” he said on Ukrainian television. “There is no conversation in which the president does not raise the topic of weapons that are necessary for our brigades for the counteroffensive.”

‘The doorstep to World War III’

Ukrainians are not willing to wait for several decades for liberation in a divided country. More than 70 percent of citizens say they should liberate all of their state territories—according to the post-Soviet borders defined in 1991—now.

“Look, Prigozhin is already withdrawing from Bakhmut ‘to lick their wounds.’ But we should not let him lick his wounds, we should win this war already—and every school kid knows today that to win, Ukraine needs jets and long-range missiles,” Viktoria Bondarenko, a 33-year-old postgraduate student in Ukraine, told The Daily Beast. She was referring to a video recently released by the Wagner mercenary group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, deriding the Russian Defense Ministry for lack of resources from a field covered with dead Russian fighters.

Bondarenko and her friend Svitlana brought flowers to Kyiv’s Remembrance Wall, a monument covered with hundreds of portraits of fallen Ukrainian soldiers and activists outside of the Mikhailovsky Church.

“I personally cannot stand the idea when I think how indifferent decision-makers abroad eat in restaurants, enjoy their peaceful lives, when Ukrainian boys get killed in massive numbers, or lose limbs or eyes,” she told The Daily Beast.

Russian missiles continue to rain on Ukraine every day, with more than 20 civilians killed in artillery fire on Kherson since Monday. Almost every Ukrainian family has lost friends or relatives in this war.

Pavlo Kukhta, former minister for economic development, learned his friend and colleague, energy expert Oleksiy Khabatyuk, was killed on the front last week.

“He went to fight as a volunteer soldier, I was very worried about him,” an emotional Kukhta told The Daily Beast. “It is time to finish this war quickly, put an end to suffering, to troubles. The West’s support in winning this war is ultimately important for us: We have to win right away, preferably now.”

Doubts about Ukraine winning this year have taken their toll on those on the front lines, too. “We basically just smile with bitter irony when we hear pessimism about our victory. We count only on ourselves; any doubts about our victory would cost us lives,” Kateryna, a paramedic from Kyiv, told The Daily Beast.

Though Ukrainians have been known to maintain a good sense of humor and great resilience in troubled times, “This is not the time to joke. The situation is very serious: We are on the doorstep of World War III,” Oleksiy Goncharuk, the former Ukrainian prime minister, told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “Ukraine is fighting with the dictatorship for the West’s freedom and democracy. Victory costs us many lives.”