Views From Both Sides of the Front Line: What Ukrainians and Russians think about ending the war

The prospect of a difficult winter

Ukraine is preparing for a difficult winter. According to a Rating Group survey conducted on 3–5 October, 34% of Ukrainians surveyed believe that the situation on the front line will shift in Kyiv’s favour this winter, while only 22% hold the opposite view. In other areas, however, those surveyed expect a significant deterioration: 63% believe the energy situation will worsen, 71% anticipate a general economic downturn and 55% expect the situation in the country as a whole to deteriorate. Ukrainians are becoming more apathetic as a result of intensive Russian shelling and high-profile corruption scandals, according to Rating Group director Oleksii Antypovych. Residents of Kyiv are the most anxious: their assessments of Ukraine’s future and the current situation are markedly more negative than those of people in other cities. Nevertheless, even if the situation on the front line deteriorates sharply, more than half of Ukrainians do not intend to leave their town or village, while around 80% would not be prepared to relocate even in the event of a prolonged loss of water and electricity supplies.

War fatigue and declining morale are also evident in responses to the perennial question about ‘victory’, which sociologists periodically put to Ukrainians. The question, ‘Do you think Ukraine or Russia will ultimately win the war?’, is clearly speculative, but nevertheless revealing, as it measures the current level of societal mobilisation. According to a September poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians (79%) still believe that Ukraine will ultimately win. Of these, 47% are ‘definitely’ confident of victory, while 32% are ‘somewhat’ confident. In July, the proportion expecting victory stood at 85%, including 60% who were ‘definitely’ confident. This shift indicates a significant decline in the level of mobilisation, particularly among those who are unequivocally confident of victory, whose share has fallen by 13 percentage points. The current figure is comparable to that recorded in February last year, when Trump’s return to the White House was accompanied by an abrupt halt to US aid to Kyiv and a severe crisis in relations between Ukraine and Washington. The KIIS poll was conducted before the current crisis in those relations.

Rating Group asks a similar question, but focuses on the present rather than the future. According to its October findings, almost two-thirds of those surveyed believe that neither Ukraine nor Russia is currently winning the war. A further quarter of those surveyed say Ukraine has the upper hand, while just 6% believe Russia is winning. This is also more an indicator of societal mobilisation than a dispassionate assessment of the situation on the ground. In the difficult year of 2025, the balance of responses was 23% to 15% in Ukraine’s favour. In 2026, Ukrainian optimism increased: in early summer, amid successful Ukrainian air offensives (→ Re: Russia: Offensive lockdown), 36% said that Ukraine was ‘winning’. By early October, as we can see, the proportion of optimists had fallen by 10 percentage points.

Against this backdrop of growing fatigue and pessimism, freezing the conflict along the line of confrontation is gradually becoming the default and increasingly consensual scenario for ending the war among Ukrainians. There are, however, important nuances.

Scenarios for ending the war: red lines and new guarantees

Asked by Rating Group which scenario for ending the war would be preferable for Ukraine, 57% of those surveyed favour a cessation of hostilities and the start of negotiations with Russia. By contrast, 13% believe the right course is to continue fighting until Ukraine’s February 2022 borders are restored, while a further 21% favour continuing the war until the occupied parts of Donbas and Crimea are recovered. It is worth noting, however, that this distribution has remained broadly stable since the beginning of 2025. The latter two groups, together accounting for 34% of those surveyed, therefore do not regard a halt to the war along the current line of contact as a desirable outcome, while 57% express fairly clear support for it.

When asked a more pointed question, namely whether Ukraine should seek a compromise in negotiations or abandon negotiations and continue fighting until all its territories are liberated, the balance in favour of negotiations rises to 83% against 9%. A third question on the same subject asks whether Ukraine should make territorial concessions to achieve peace. Here, 35% reject this possibility, while 56% consider such concessions acceptable ‘provided there are genuine security guarantees from the United States and European countries, including funding for the Ukrainian army and the provision of the necessary weapons’.

KIIS obtained very similar results in response to comparable questions in September. When asked about possible scenarios for ending the war, 41% of those surveyed agreed that Ukraine would retain its independence but lose some territory. A further 18% considered a return to the 2022 borders, or even the full recovery of Luhansk and Donetsk regions, a likely outcome (the two responses accounted for 14% and 4%, respectively). Another 23% anticipated the return of Crimea, while 12% envisaged military operations extending into Russian territory. The range of options offered by the pollsters here has a somewhat propagandistic, mobilisation-oriented character, encouraging respondents to give more assertive answers. As we can see, 53% of those surveyed believe Ukraine will still manage to recover at least some of the occupied territories, while 41% are less optimistic and expect the loss of territory to persist for the foreseeable future. At the beginning of the year, however, when asked the same mobilisation-oriented question, 60% favoured the former position and 33% the latter. The level of mobilisation has declined in this respect as well.

At the same time, when respondents are asked directly about a specific scenario, the results are more decisive. The question reads: ‘How would you feel about an immediate, complete ceasefire along the current line of hostilities, provided that Ukraine does not legally recognise the occupied territories as part of Russia and continues to strengthen its armed forces and pursue EU and NATO membership, while acknowledging that a comprehensive peace treaty with the Russian Federation is impossible?’ More than two-thirds of those surveyed (69%) support this option, while just 22% oppose it. In a survey conducted in late July–early August, 59% agreed with this arrangement and 31% opposed it; in late May and early June, the respective figures were 53% and 37%. Thus, over the summer, and particularly in August, willingness to halt the conflict along the current line of contact increased substantially.

The two polls reveal two distinct approaches among those surveyed to possible scenarios for ending the war. When questions are phrased more loosely, 55–60% remain willing to continue fighting to liberate at least some of the territories occupied by Russia. When the conditions are more restrictive and the emphasis is on the realism of possible outcomes, by contrast, 55–70% are willing to accept a freeze along the current line of contact. However, the condition is now less about direct security guarantees from NATO or the United States, as it was previously, and more about the absence of restrictions on strengthening Ukraine’s armed forces, together with guarantees of support for their integration into Europe’s and the wider West’s military and economic structures. This shift from the idea of formal security guarantees to guarantees of the development and strengthening of Ukraine’s military capabilities reflects not only an acknowledgement that comprehensive security guarantees from the West are unattainable, alongside declining trust in external guarantees of any kind, but also much greater confidence in Ukraine’s own defensive capabilities and in a degree of convergence between Russian and Ukrainian military potential.

As the polls show, war fatigue is contributing to a shrinking group of ‘hardliners’, namely those firmly determined to continue fighting to recover lost territory. At the same time, the coexistence of these two strands in assessments of possible outcomes reflects less a gap between what people want and what is achievable, as might appear at first glance, than a distinction between exhaustion and willingness to capitulate. Ukrainians are adapting to the prospect that recovering territory through armed confrontation may not be possible at this stage. However, they regard the strengthening and development of Ukraine’s military capabilities as an existential red line.

To some extent, the same applies to respondents’ perceptions of the hardships looming this winter. Although the prospect of these difficulties causes considerable anxiety, 62% still say they are prepared to endure the war for as long as necessary, according to a KIIS poll. This is a typical level of resolve for the winter: the figure was the same in 2025. In Kyiv, one of the principal targets of the current wave of missile and drone attacks, the proportion declaring their willingness to endure the war for as long as necessary is even higher, at 72%. In the September KIIS poll, when asked what Ukraine should do in the face of the Russian threat to leave people without electricity, heating or sanitation this winter, only 12% answered that Ukraine should ‘agree to Russia’s demands’, while 77% supported continuing armed resistance. In Kyiv, this figure was the highest in the country, at 83%. It could therefore be said that Ukrainians’ outlook on the prospects for ending the conflict has become more pessimistic, but also more strategically realistic and internally consistent.

The Russian perspective: a demobilised society

Although Russians bear the costs and hardships of the war to a far lesser extent than Ukrainians, war fatigue is also growing in Russia. As noted in our review of public sentiment at the end of the summer, the level of expressed support for the war in respondents’ answers declined somewhat in 2026 (→ Re :Russia: August Sociology). Attention to events in Ukraine has also waned, although this overall trend saw a slight reversal in the summer of 2026, driven by the high intensity of Ukrainian strikes against Russian infrastructure. Overall, average levels of attention to the war have fallen by around 10 percentage points compared with 2025.

Two distinct processes can be discerned. Among younger people, those who follow developments in the war only to a limited extent are moving into the category of those who do not follow them at all. Among older people, the group that follows events closely is shrinking (see table). Attention to military news is declining in parallel among pensioners and those who rely on television for their information about the world, two groups that largely overlap. This points to a trend of television-driven demobilisation: television no longer plays the central role in the propaganda apparatus that it was assigned both during the 2014–2015 conflict and in the initial phase of the full-scale invasion. Moreover, against the backdrop of four years of fighting for Donbas, confidence in propaganda about the Russian army’s successes is also declining (→ Re: Russia: The War Has Killed Television).

Changes in attention to the war across different social groups, September 2026, % of those surveyed

The proportion of Russians who believe the country should move towards peace negotiations rather than continue military operations reached a peak last winter (November 2025 to March 2026), at 65%, compared with 26% who believed that the war should continue in pursuit of the ‘objectives of the military operation’. Over the following six months, the balance shifted slightly, to 62% versus 29%, returning to levels seen in mid-2025. The difference is marginal, however, and in September the figures once again approached the ‘winter’ range, at 64% versus 27%. In any case, over the past year, only slightly more than a quarter of Russians have favoured continuing military operations, while just under two-thirds have supported the negotiating track. (As always, however, it should be noted that in a repressive climate of opinion, the proportion of Russians who oppose the war or hold critical views is likely to be underrepresented in polls. For more, see → Re: Russia: Pro-War Spring.)

However, the question of how the war should and could end presents a much more complex problem for Russian public opinion. The Levada Center asks this question in two different ways, randomly dividing the sample into two groups. One group is asked whether they would support a decision by Putin to end the war as early as this week. This wording implies that Russia would not only fail to achieve its repeatedly stated political ‘objectives of the war’, including a change of government in Kyiv, restrictions on the Ukrainian armed forces and guarantees concerning the status of the Russian language, but would also abandon its attempt to capture the remaining part of Donbas. In the second version of the question, Putin not only ends the war but also returns the ‘annexed territories’ to Ukraine. This term generally refers to territories occupied since February 2022, including the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

‘If President Putin were to decide <…> this week, would you support or oppose this decision?’ , September 2026, % of those surveyed

Since May 2023, the experiment with the two questions has been repeated seven times. Support for a decision by Putin to end the war immediately, without any additional conditions, rose from 62% at the outset to 82% in September 2026. Correspondingly, the proportion opposing such a turn of events, and presumably wishing to achieve the stated ‘objectives of the war’, fell from 29% to 12%. Responses to the second version of the question consistently showed that a majority opposed returning the territories. From May 2023 to September 2025, an average of 30% supported their return, while 60% opposed it. In September 2026, the results moved beyond the range of normal fluctuations around these averages. Support for returning the territories increased more modestly, to 35%, while opposition fell substantially, to 51%. The proportion of those who were ‘undecided’ correspondingly rose from 10% to 14%. Across the previous six polls, an average of 42% had been ‘definitely opposed’ to returning the territories; in the latest poll, this proportion fell to 34%.

Looking at the results by socio-demographic group, the most notable change concerns respondents aged 25–39, among whom a relative majority now supports ending the war and returning the territories, as has been the case from the outset among those aged 18–24. As a result, among the broader 18–39 age group, 45% now support the scenario of returning the territories, while 37% oppose it. The second trend is the decline in opposition to returning the territories among groups predominantly associated with the ‘military loyalty’ camp: men, older respondents, those who believe the country is moving in the right direction, and those who rely on television and Telegram for information. Previously, these groups contained solid majorities opposed to returning the territories. Today, that opposition is less pronounced. Among those who believe the country is moving in the right direction, for example, 25% supported returning the territories in 2023–2024, while 66% opposed it. The corresponding figures are now 32% and 57%.

These shifts do not indicate any fundamental change in the views of Russian society, but they nevertheless reflect the gradual erosion of the ‘zone of loyalty’. They also suggest that, against the backdrop of a protracted war, the ‘annexed territories’ have not become a ‘trophy’ for Russians. This issue remains, and will continue to be, a latent trigger for political and social change. Perceptions of it will depend to a considerable extent on the broader social and economic situation. If conditions deteriorate, the territories are likely to be seen as a burden, consuming already scarce domestic resources.