Kyiv, Ukraine – Natalya Brovko doesn’t believe that Ukraine will be whole again.
In recent months, Ukrainian forces have been slowly retreating in the eastern Donbas region amid excruciating losses, and top brass warn that the front line may burst open because of dire shortages of ammunition and manpower.
“With all these retreats, I don’t see how we can even get back what we lost,” the 37-year-old mother of two told Al Jazeera.
“I was scared two years ago and now I am scared again,” she said, remembering when Russian forces tried to seize Kyiv and occupied sizeable chunks of four regions in Ukraine’s east and south.
For the first time since the war began in February 2022, fewer than half – 45 percent – of Ukrainians believe that their nation could return to its borders before the 2014 annexation of Crimea, according to a survey by Rating, an independent pollster, released in early April.
A year ago, the figure was 74 percent, Rating said.
At the time, Ukraine was riding high on the success of its counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, when daring manoeuvring forced Russian forces to hastily retreat from most of the northeastern Kharkiv region.
Months earlier, Moscow withdrew its forces from around Kyiv and all of northern Ukraine, and many Ukrainians and observers were confident that Ukrainian forces would swiftly reach the Sea of Azov to bisect Russia’s land bridge between Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists carved out one of two “People’s republics” in 2014, and Crimea.
But the counteroffensive’s failure filled Ukrainians with pessimism – especially in Russian-occupied areas.
“No one is coming to the rescue, there’s no way we can become part of Ukraine again,” Halyna, who lives in the town of Henichesk in the southern region of Kherson that has been occupied since March 2022, told Al Jazeera.
The perspective of returning Crimea and the Donbas after a decade of separation seems especially impossible – only seven percent of those polled believe in the reconquest.
The pessimism is a combination of several factors.
After more than two years of the conflict, tens of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen have been killed or wounded, millions of civilians fled abroad or to safer areas, and the economy nosedived.
And while Russia ups the ante on the front lines and with almost daily shelling of civilian areas, the public is divided about Ukraine’s new mobilisation law adopted earlier this month, after months of…