Washington, July 21, 2026 --  

Russians and Ukrainians have finally lost their zeal for war despite no sign of it coming to an end.

After four years of grueling war following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, domestic support for the conflict in both countries is beginning to wane. A series of dramatic protests in Ukraine have rocked its cities in recent weeks while in Russia public complacency has turned to fear and resentment as long range Ukrainian drones bring the war to Russians' doorsteps.

Unrest in Ukraine's relatively open society started early this month with violent attacks on draft recruiters in the western city of Lviv, who were stripped of their clothes and their vehicle overturned and destroyed.¹ Patriotic zeal to join the army to defend the homeland against Russian invaders is now almost gone. The grim reality for Ukrainian infantrymen is hiding in trenches waiting to be killed by endless human wave attacks by Russia's much larger population.

Things then got worse. President Zelenskyy foolishly fired his reformist defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov who had bitter policy disagreements with Ukraine's top general. The feud started over Federov's push to accelerate replacement of many humans on the battlefield with robots, a move resisted by General Oleksandr Syrskyi whose career spans from the Soviet era.

This enraged protesters, who perceived General Syrskyi's victory as sentencing thousands of Ukrainian men to years of pointless death in the trenches. Bowing to pressure from the street, Zelenskyy then fired General Syrskyi and offered Federov an undefined leadership position.² Time will tell whether this proves a victory for military reformists like Federov and will prove to satisfy protesters.

Russia's war weariness, by contrast, is a newer and more slow-burning phenomenon. It is based largely on shock after Ukraine's growing numbers of long-range drones have rocked Russia's cities and refineries with explosions from increasingly large warheads creating huge clouds of black smoke that are impossible to ignore. Fuel shortages from burn-out refineries and fuel depots are finally bringing the costs of a once-hidden war home.

In contrast to Ukraine, Russia is seeing no mass protests, just sporadic breakouts of dissent. While independent polls from Russia's Levada show the government's popularity has dropped to its lowest level since the war began, approval remains at nearly 60 percent.³ Even if this is skewed by fear of speaking honestly, such a high approval is an amazing feat given Western estimates of as many as 450,000 Russian deaths in the war and 1.4 million total casualties.⁴ Unlike the 1980s war in Afghanistan with far fewer deaths, today's Russia has managed to avoid repeating the public's revolt over Afghanistan because of today's recruitment of soldiers from its massive prison population as well as from poor provincial regions far from Russia's influential elite.

But Russia's ingenious techniques for filling the trenches without angering the general public may be coming to a dead end. Since March, Russia has failed to recruit enough new soldiers to replace those lost on the battlefield,⁵ leading to widespread speculation of a new mobilization drive in the fall to recruit hundreds of thousands of fresh Russian troops for the war.

Over this same period of time, Ukraine's use of aerial drones and tracked ground robots on the front lines has halted Russian advances and even started to push them back in places. Whether or not this trend can continue depends on Ukraine's ability to successfully deploy more robotic forces while filling the ranks with enough fresh troops for jobs that must be done by humans.

On the other side, Russia's fall mobilization drive, if successful, could return forward movement on the Ukrainian front line, but risks public support for the war, and perhaps even a rebellion of Russia's elite and their closest oligarchs if their sons end up being dragged off to a pointless death.

Both Russia and Ukraine have seen a mass exodus since the war began. Over a million people have emigrated from Russia, many of them military age men fleeing the draft.⁶ A similar emigration phenomenon has happened in Ukraine, and both militaries reportedly have a shockingly high desertion rates. It is no surprise that the war is unpopular with men forced to risk death in it. Finally, four years on, it appears that public sentiment in both countries is starting to catch up with them.

Related Web Columns:

Still Standing, May 12, 2026

A Ray of Hope, March 18, 2025

Notes:

1. France 24, What the Lviv Draft Riot Tells us About Ukraine's Struggle to Send Men to Fight, July 14, 2026

2. BBC, Zelensky Sacks Ukraine's Top Army Commander After Days of Protests, July 21, 2026

3. Levada, Approval of the Government, June 2026

4. Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin's War, July 1, 2026

5. Institute for Study of War, Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 14, 2026

6. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Russian Emigration Patterns during the Russia-Ukraine War: Interviews with Wartime Émigrés, May 31, 2024