Opinion | A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They’re Huge.

“Human morality must win this war,” Zelensky said. “Everyone in the world who values freedom, who values human life, who believes that people must win. And our success, the specific success of Ukraine, depends not only on us, on Ukrainians, but also on the extent to which the entire vast moral space of the world wants to preserve itself.”

But securing justice in war almost always requires the total defeat and occupation of the aggressor. Russia has more than three times the population of Ukraine. And when you listen to Ukrainian soldiers speak, you hear a cocktail of Zelensky-like defiance, mixed with admissions of exhaustion.

The conference featured a panel of four male Ukrainian soldiers, one missing a forearm and one an eye, and a woman soldier. All had fought at the front. Here is how Dmytro Finashyn, an intelligence officer of the National Guard of Ukraine, whose left forearm was a black prosthetic, put it: “Our best people are dying, those who should shape the future of Ukraine. That is why it is necessary to reduce our losses. The world must help us, because we are fighting for global democracy.”.

Alina Mykhailova, an officer who has been in the field for well over a year, started to cry during her presentation, mourning the loss of a beloved commander. “We are suffering huge casualties; there is no romanticizing battle and war. It is dirty, it is nasty and bad,” she said. “Every time you go to bed you should remind yourself how hard it is” for the soldiers at the front. “What we see at the front lines today, you would not learn from TV.” She added, “Each of us needs personal support, every soldier should have support: a family or a loved one, or any person who does not avert their eyes and understands what we are fighting for.”

Don’t get me wrong, this is a Ukrainian army ready to fight on — and any politician in this country, including Zelensky, who just hints at a territorial compromise will be run out of office. But the math is cruel. Everyone who volunteered, right after the invasion, has gone to the front, which means more and more Ukrainians will have to be drafted. While many show up, they often look to join drone units — not the trench warfare infantry — and more and more have been trying to bribe or flee their way out of the draft. That is why Zelensky recently had to fire the entire top leadership of his regional military recruitment centers.