Since September 1st, the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, has only been attacked by Russian drones one night – October 14th.
Each night, many of its 4.5 million residents are woken by sirens and rushed to some kind of shelter or hidden in their bathrooms.
In the first week of November alone, sirens sounded for 43 hours.
The attacks are just one indicator of Russia’s ability to pursue the war full steam ahead at a time when Ukraine faces deep uncertainty about future support from the US and Europe.
The cities of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa have also come under frequent drone and missile attacks in recent weeks, in what appears to be a renewed effort by Russia to break the resolve of Ukrainian civilians.
On Saturday night (9), Ukrainian air defenses detected a record 145 Shahed drones.
The increase in attacks on cities comes as Russian forces gain the Donetsk region, while Ukrainian units suffer from manpower shortages and are increasingly overstretched on the front line.
Constant anxiety
Kiev residents told CNN of the long, scary nights of sirens, with debris falling on buildings, businesses and homes.
Viktoria Kovalchuk said that after drone debris fell near her home last week, her 6-year-old son Teo was “very scared and clung to me.”
She said Teo was in a state of constant anxiety. “In the last two months, when the bombings became more frequent, we hid in the bathroom or went down to the shelter in the basement,” Kovalchuk said.
“I don’t remember any occasion where we had a proper night’s sleep,” added the mother.
Business is also suffering. A man who identified himself as Maksym told the CNN that debris punctured the roof of his restaurant last week, causing about $10,000 in damage.
“We will restore everything on our own and continue working as we have been doing,” he insisted.
The alarms themselves are extremely disruptive to city life. Bridges close, public transport is disrupted and the two parts of the capital on either side of the Dnipro River are effectively cut off.
Konstantin Usov, deputy mayor of Kiev, told CNN that during attacks, “the city freezes… This in itself leads to huge delays in the functioning of the city’s economy.”
Many children do not go to school during the alerts, Usov said.
Furthermore, many air defense batteries are manned by volunteers from all walks of life – among them one of the judges of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, Yuriy Chumak.
Chumak told CNN that territorial defense units included members of parliament, an opera singer and a TV presenter.
“We’ve been doing this for over two years,” he said, but the intensity of drone strikes has peaked in the last two to three months.
Their equipment is low-tech – machine guns on the roofs of eight tall buildings. “The drones were flying low, (so) it was realistic and cheap to shoot them down with a machine gun.”
“At night, we are on duty all the time. There are attacks every day now,” Chumak added.
Drone strikes appear calculated to instill fear rather than cause mass casualties, but several people have been killed in recent weeks. Among them was 15-year-old Mariya Troyanivska, described by schoolmates in Kiev as an inspiration “who loved life and gave joy to everyone around her”.
The Kiev International Institute of Sociology regularly asks people whether Ukraine should continue fighting for as long as necessary. The number of people saying yes fell from 73% in February to 63% last month.
‘Tough’ front lines
This perception is likely fueled by news from the front, where Russian attacks continue to erode Ukrainian defenses, especially near Donetsk’s main center of Pokrovsk.
The commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Oleksander Syrskyi, said on Saturday that, “the situation remains difficult and tends to escalate. The enemy, taking advantage of its numerical superiority, continues to conduct offensive actions and concentrates its main efforts in the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions.”
After a two-week trip to Ukraine last month, analyst Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting said the main problem is integrating the newly mobilized troops.
Muzyka posted on X that the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region “further stretched the already small Ukrainian forces.”
The Ukrainians are using a variety of battlefield drones to inflict losses on the Russians. Syrskyi said more than 52,000 enemy targets were destroyed or damaged by drones in October alone.
But drones cannot make up for infantry shortages, Muzyka reflected. Despite a law passed earlier this year to improve mobilization, “the presence of newly mobilized units/soldiers is practically imperceptible.”
“We have a situation where the Ukrainians not only cannot keep up with replacing losses, but are also losing soldiers at an increasingly rapid rate due to falling morale,” Muzyka said on X.
Russian forces became more adept at exploiting weaker points on the front line, which allowed them to destroy Ukrainian defenses within a 10 km radius of Pokrovsk.
In many other parts of the front line, the Ukrainians are also on the defensive, with some analysts expecting another Russian advance in the south. The only gains for the Ukrainians this year have been inside Russia, where they launched a surprise incursion into the Kursk region in August.
The negative outlook has worsened the mood among Ukraine’s allies, who are talking much less about Kiev prevailing on the battlefield — and much more about it holding enough ground to force the Kremlin to negotiate.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hinted as much. “No single capability will turn the tide. No system will end Putin’s attack. What matters is the combined effects of Ukraine’s military capabilities — and staying focused on what works.”
Rym Montaz, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, assesses that there is a “growing and silent consensus that negotiations, which will involve accepting at least a temporary loss of sovereignty over territories, are the only way to end this war” .
“Kiev is at one of its weakest points since February 2022, and the prospect of selling such a deal is a political minefield” for Zelensky, says Montaz.
Victory, defined by the Ukrainian government as the expulsion of Russian troops from all of its territory, is widely seen as unattainable.
In a new essay in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass says that “Washington must deal with the harsh realities of war and come to terms with a more plausible outcome.”
“There is no game-changing weapon or lifted restriction that will allow Ukraine to simultaneously defend what it already controls and liberate what it does not,” Haas writes.
Ukrainian authorities are putting on a brave face in the face of a bleak outlook.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on Saturday that “I am convinced that we are all united by the goal of achieving a just peace for Ukraine and stopping Russian aggression… We are talking about a just peace, not appeasement.”
The path to any negotiation is – to say the least – unclear. The Kremlin says its goals in Ukraine have not changed, which is the annexation of four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine. Russian forces already occupy almost all of Luhansk and substantial parts of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – in total, about 20% of Ukraine.
“If Ukraine wants to persuade Russia to participate in peace talks, it must first stabilize the front and rebuild its forces enough to be able to conduct offensives,” says Muzyka.
The conversation about how to end the conflict is now in full swing with Donald Trump’s electoral triumph. Trump previously said he could end the war in 24 hours and in September declared “I think it’s in the best interest of the United States to end this war and just do it.”
One option favored by his vice president-elect, JD Vance, is to freeze the conflict on its current lines with a heavily fortified demilitarized zone to deter future Russian aggression. Along an ill-defined front line hundreds of kilometers long, this would be a daunting and perhaps impossible task.
It would reward the Kremlin with control of territories already taken. Moscow would also demand guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality or at least the indefinite suspension of its initiative to join NATO.
Even if covertly, this would be impossible for President Volodymyr Zelensky to swallow without guarantees of Ukraine’s future security. And after the sacrifices of the last 1,000 days, it would also be unpalatable for many Ukrainians.
Chumak, the Supreme Court judge, insisted CNN “our mood is patriotic, it has not changed, we are ready to go to the end.”
But fate may be changing.
When will Donald Trump be inaugurated as President of the United States?
This content was originally published in Analysis: Ukraine faces uncertain future as Russia carries out record drone attacks on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
