Victory which once seemed so close has sadly slipped below the horizon, says Lt Yulia Mykytenko

Roland Oliphant Senior Foreign Correspondent

20 October 2024 7:00am BST

Any Western politician suffering from Ukraine fatigue could learn a lot from Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko.

“I know that I am tired. I’m really tired. I know that my people are also tired. A lot of them I took from assault units, so they are, like, extremely tired,” the 29-year-old philology graduate says.

“And we are also sort of ready for negotiations, but we are just asking that the West insists on our interests.”

Lt Mykytenko is composed, gently spoken, and quietly humorous. But she’s clearly mentally elsewhere. As we speak in London, where a new book is due out this week describing her decade-long war, she is constantly checking her phone. Giving orders, doing admin, simply staying in touch with her men.

The commander of a 25-man strong drone reconnaissance platoon in Ukraine’s 54th mechanised brigade, she has spent the past two-and-a-half years on the Donbas front.

Her days are spent directing reconnaissance, thwarting enemy assaults, and trying to win a deadly technological arms race with Russian drone commanders on the other side of no-man’s land.

This is her first break in nearly a year.  And her rare stint of leave coincides with a new drive to end the war.

Sir Keir Starmer met US president Joe Biden, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss the West’s response to the war in a meeting in Germany on Friday.

Their summit comes after Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, lobbied them to support a five-point “victory plan” that he argues could bring peace next year.

The first three points – Nato membership; strengthening the Ukrainian military and continuing its operations inside Russia; and deployment of a non-nuclear deterrence package – are basically about persuading Russia to stop the invasion and deterring it from doing it again.

Point four is about rebuilding the Ukrainian economy, and includes a sales pitch around access to Ukraine’s natural resources. Point five appeals to Nato’s, and particularly American, self-interest: Ukraine’s large, battle-hardened army would contribute to European security and possibly take over some of America’s current European security commitments within Nato.

There are three secret annexes that have not been made public. But from what we know, the plan is obviously meant to address perceived Western, and especially American, fatigue with the war by signposting a way out if it.

But it depends on massive commitments from the West. And the West does not seem impressed.

President Biden has already vetoed a request for long-range strike capabilities that is central to Mr Zelensky’s defence concept. There has been no serious progress on Nato membership, despite support from Britain and Poland.

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has made no sign that she will deviate from Joe Biden’s policy of providing enough kit to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not enough to antagonise Russia into “escalating” the conflict.

Republican rival Donald Trump has made no secret of his wish to end the war quickly, and most suspect that means quickly cutting a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin that suspends US aid to the Ukrainians.

Mr Zelensky met all three of them on a recent trip to the United States, and none have embraced his plan wholeheartedly.

So where does that leave the war – and the men and women fighting it?

General Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain and a former commander-in-chief of its armed forces, this week hinted that Ukraine could accept a peace deal that saw it give up some of its land to Russia.

Asked in London on Thursday if he could imagine a victory without getting all the lost territory back, he said: “I didn’t mention territories. I mentioned safety, security, and the feeling of being in one’s own home.

“For me personally, as Valery Zaluzhny, if I lived in my house and was aware my neighbour took a part of my garden, I’d say we need to resolve this. If not now, then your sons would have to resolve the issue.”

That is a subtle, but profound shift in official rhetoric which previously insisted on no peace until all of Ukraine was reclaimed.

Asked if her own expectations have changed, Lt Mykytenko remarks that early chances to win and end the war were squandered.

“I knew that the war wouldn’t end in a few weeks, and we wouldn’t be in Crimea in a few months, as our government used to say. I completely understood that. But I was hoping for much more help from the Western world,” she said.

“I was hoping to get F16s at the end of 2022. I was hoping to get Patriots and Abrams at the end of 2022, when we really needed them, when we had a really motivated army, when we had a lot of warriors who were ready to fight.”

If only, she muses, the West had sent enough help on time, or if the massive 2023 offensive had been put into Kursk, instead of the heavily fortified Russian lines in occupied Zaporizhzhya.

“Now we are being given a small amount of those weapons, and we are expected to use them the same as in 2022 but unfortunately, we won’t, because a lot of warriors are dead, missing and injured.”

“Our motivation, let’s be honest, is much lower than it was even one year ago. So yeah, we had a great chance to end it up to 2023, if we had got everything that we asked for, and now it’s almost impossible. We won’t recover the strengths which we had in 2022 for at least 10 years.”

In short, the victory which once seemed so close has slipped below the horizon.

And Ukraine has already been at war for a decade.

Lt Mykytenko is a veteran of the eight-year Donbas war that preceded the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Her husband, a fellow soldier, was killed at the front in 2017. Her father, who also fought against the first Russian invasion, later killed himself in protest at the perceived betrayal of his son-in-law and other comrades’ sacrifice by Mr Zelensky’s early attempts to find a compromise with Russia to end the conflict.

A recent report by Chatham House identified three possible outcomes in the absence of a Ukrainian victory – a long, additional war that tests each side to its limit; a frozen conflict that allows either side to rebuild its forces; or all-out Ukrainian defeat with Russian dictating terms of surrender including a change of government, demilitarisation, and neutrality.

In some allied capitals, it is thought that the first option might play to Ukraine’s advantage.

“We are thinking about how we can support [Zelensky] in getting what he needs to hold Pokovsk and the land that’s there in Kursk,” said one Western official

“We are expecting Ukraine to be able to hold where it is over the next period. But what we see, as we look much further ahead, is strains starting to grow on Russia in 2025 and into 2026,” the official added.

But can Ukraine last that long on the current trajectory?

Lt Mykytenko’s part of the front has barely moved in two years, largely, she says, because the brigade has carefully invested in defences and mastered rapid coordination between infantry, drones and artillery to defeat Russian attacks. “And they have tried,” she said.

And while she and her men are tired, it is pretty obvious the Russians are too, she adds. Western sources say Russia was running a daily casualty rate of 1,271 in September.

But elsewhere, Russia has the initiative. Western officials reported “fairly consistent, slow, tactical losses by Ukraine” across the frontline including in the part of Kursk region that Mr Zelensky wants to use as leverage for his victory plan.

The number of attacks by one-way “kamikaze” drones has doubled monthly from 350 in July to about 750 in August to 1,500 in September.

I do not care what flag I live under

Meanwhile, Russia is gathering allies. Mr Zelensky and Ukrainian intelligence officials now say they have intelligence about 12,000 North Korean troops about to enter the fight on the Russian side (Western officials said they could not confirm those reports).

Russia is already receiving drones and, the United States and Britain claim, ballistic missiles, from Iran. And The United States on Friday announced sanctions against Chinese firms who have reportedly begun supplying complete drones, rather than just parts, to Russia – a sign that Beijing, too, is increasing its support for Moscow.

“Can Ukraine alone prevail against this alliance? Maybe not,” Gen Zaluzhny said this week.

Some commentators, reaching for 20th-century analogies, argue a frozen conflict could be the least imperfect solution: the Cold War division of Germany; the ceasefire-line in Cyprus; the 70-year ceasefire along the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, all more or less held.

The implication is clear. Some in the occupied territories already see little chance of anything else.

“I feel neutral about the situation with Russia. I would accept being part of Russia if it meant the fighting would end. I don’t care what flag I live under – my home is my home either way,” one 20-year-old resident of Mariupol told the Telegraph by text message when asked about the idea.

But all these ideas require Russia, too, to seek a settlement.

One Western official asked if there was any sign Putin is interested in talking peace said: “None whatsoever.”

Instead, he is thought to be waiting for the outcome of the US presidential election in the hope that Western support begins to fade.

“We do see evidence of people around him being concerned at the cost of the war, and I imagine that Putin is aware of that. But at this point our quite strong assessment is that his war aims in Ukraine are unchanged,” the official said.

For Lt Mykytenko, used to looking at the war via drone screen in a frontline dugout, that is a statement of the painfully obvious.

“If the agreement is just to give Ukrainian territory to Russia with no consequences for Russia, then Russia will mobilise all the people who are on occupied territories and try to attack Ukraine again,” she said.

“It’s going to be like a pause to prepare for a new war, and Russia will do it more quickly than we do.”

If the West does not also use the time to re-arm, the next war will be lost, she warned.

A repeat of the Minsk agreements that congealed, but never entirely froze, the Donbas war for eight years are not an option, she said.

Nonetheless, if safeguards were in place to prevent that, she would consider negotiations.

I ask her what her father, so appalled at Mr Zelensky’s early attempts to compromise with Russia before the full scale invasion, would make of such talk.

She pauses, then remarks that “he probably wouldn’t be alive to see it anyway. He was a risk taker on the frontline. He would probably be dead. Killed fighting.”

“Maybe,” she says with a soft laugh, “he’s the lucky one. I don’t know.”

How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine, by Lara Marlowe, is published by the Head of Zeus imprint of Bloomsbury