The New York Times: Russian Troops Are War-Weary, but Want to Conquer More of Ukraine

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1. Article below:

   Many Russian soldiers say they would see a cease-fire along the current front lines as a failure, hinting at the nationalist discontent the Kremlin could face in accepting a cease-fire.

   Listen to this article · 9:17 min Learn more
   A large group of soldiers marching in columns at an outdoor event.
   Russian soldiers who served in the military campaign in Ukraine taking part this month in a parade in Moscow celebrating Victory Day, the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.Credit…Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
   Anatoly Kurmanaev
   By Anatoly Kurmanaev
   Reporting from Berlin
   May 17, 2025
   Updated 6:20 a.m. ET
   In the diplomatic maneuvering over the war in Ukraine, many Ukrainians and their European allies have accused President Trump of offering the Kremlin too many concessions to secure a quick peace deal.

   Things look very different from Russia’s bunkers and military hospitals. To many Russian soldiers and their nationalist supporters, the peace proposals from Washington amount to far too little.

   In interviews, 11 Russian soldiers who are fighting or have fought in Ukraine expressed deep skepticism of diplomatic efforts that on Friday produced the first direct peace talks in three years, but were brief and yielded little. Speaking by telephone, the soldiers said they rejected an unconditional cease-fire proposed by Ukraine, adding that Russian forces should keep fighting at least until they conquer all of the four southern and eastern Ukrainian regions claimed, but only partly controlled, by the Kremlin.

   “We’re all tired, we want to go home. But we want to take all of the regions, so that we don’t have to struggle for them in the future,” said Sergei, a drafted Russian soldier fighting in the eastern Donetsk region, referring to the annexed territory. “Otherwise, have all the guys died in vain?”

   The interviews are a rare window into Russian military morale, underlining the domestic challenges President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would face in ending the war on terms that fall short of his maximalist goals. The soldiers’ demands also suggest that Mr. Putin’s hasty annexation of four Ukrainian regions early in the war may have limited his current options in negotiations because a significant part of the population would view anything less as a defeat.

   The New York Times verified identities of the soldiers through social media and personal documents, but is withholding their last names to protect them against retribution.

   The soldiers, who have fought in different units and different areas, spoke with deep bitterness about their country’s officials and civilians, whom they accuse of benefiting from the war while ignoring frontline hardships. Their comments point to the difficulties Russia would face after any peace deal in integrating servicemen back into civilian life, and in moving the wartime economy back onto a civilian footing.

   “Do you understand what it means for a country to have a million people who have been trained to kill without fear of blood?” said Dmitri, who fought in Ukraine for a Russian paramilitary unit until October. “A million angry killers is a pretty serious problem if they will view our rulers as men who are not on their side.”

   Some of the interviewed soldiers have struggled to reconcile their personal desire for peace, and exhaustion with the war, with a need to make sense of their personal sacrifices through a victorious outcome for Russia. Although both militaries closely guard their casualty figures, independent researchers estimate that a total of more than a million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died or been seriously injured.

   “I’m in the middle of all this mess, and, honestly speaking, I am tired of it,” said a drafted Russian soldier, also named Dmitri, who remains in uniform. “I have no more desire to keep stewing in this soup.”

2. Interesting that they went from conquering ALL of Ukraine to “just give us the east and we’ll be happy.”

   Those ports are way too valuable to hand over.

3. Good luck with that.

4. They cant even conquer their own supply lines

5. lol no. Have you watched any videos of captured Russians. They have zero conception of or care for the big picture. They sign up to get out of prison. They sign up because they live in desperate poverty. They sign up for many selfish reasons but it’s not because they “want more of Ukraine”

6. > We have shown our strength. The whole world is fighting against us, and they are not getting very far,” said Yevgeniy, a Russian contract soldier who fought in Ukraine until December 2023.

   Russian soldiers thinking they’re fighting NATO and the world this whole time when they would fold in weeks to such a hypothetical attack.

7. They want a paradoxical mix of things, which just shows that they haven’t been pounded enough yet. They are still not realizing the full scale of their own casualties.

   I previously posted [a study](https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/1kas523/they_want_peace_they_dont_understand_the_goals_of/) on what their various groups are thinking, which tends to follow what this article says.

8. That’s the neat part,they don’t

9. It is interesting how the soldiers’ motivation is not to conquer land as such, but that their biggest fear is admitting the war has been a costly failure from the very beginning. Thinking like _”we are getting this much land for this many people dying and I accept that tradeoff”_ could not be further away from their heads. Instead, they are all in on _”our big lie is about to get exposed, it would be very awkward to wake up from a big lie so I accept a completely useless death just to not break the lie yet_”.

   If national suicide is their choice, Ukraine will deliver. Eastern Europe will keep providing sharp meat grinder tools.

   In a second note, I have to applaud the propaganda machine for these findings that would deserve a Nobel prize in psychology if there was one. You feed a lie as the emotional identity of people, and boom, you control those people. You can twist the lie to any needs you have at the time. Impacted people do not want anything as fiercely in life than to keep up the lie. Fairness, material wealth, freedoms, human rights – they are optional, our lie comes first. Life can be full of utter hypocrisies where words are mingled to reflect the opposite of reality, truths are irrelevant as long as there is the narrowest of mental gymnastic paths open that keeps the emotional identity alive.

   This is also, not coincidentally, the MAGA essence, and probably the basis of any other cults. Their hate identity is the emotional big lie. Keep the identity fueled and you can break anything else from their lives, lying all the way about what is happening They are basically begging for a dictator who just laughs at how easy it is to enslave such cattle. Yuri Bezmenov’s warning decades ago is in full display – Russia is the model society, but the disease is no longer contained there.

10. Sunk cost fallacy on a national scale.

11. Russian troops don’t want shit. They are conditioned to believe that Ukraine is a nazi puppet state and should not exist in its current form as it threatens Russian safety. That’s about it. Everyone in Russia supports the war because they believe that they are on the right side of history. The war will continue until one of the sides capitulates, or umtil we have a Korean scenario with frozen frontlines for decades.

12. and they are doing it at a rate of 1 foot a day.

13. That is why there is no point on capturing them as pow.

14. Souls for land, business as usual

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