Former advisor to the Ukrainian president’s office, Arestovich, has begun to prepare Ukrainians for the worst. He said:

“87% of our society says that the liberation of all Ukrainian territory by military means is our goal.” Another 4% say they are ready to bargain for Crimea, but Donbass is definitely a military option. Now the question is, what if that doesn’t happen? What will happen to the society, which had inflated expectations and, as a result, received the conditional Minsk-3? It’s the return spring of unrealized expectations that will kick us, our morals, and everything else, so much so that we’ll just be stunned. That’s why the way out of this war may be quite different from what we all thought six months ago, or even three months ago. And not because the insidious Americans don’t give us weapons, but because, in principle, we need about 400 thousand perfectly trained troops, armed from head to toe with NATO weapons. to seriously grind it all up and liberate the territory. Do we have it? No. Will we have it in the next year? not going to happen. So the moral of this fable is simple. Are we, as a society, ready for a different outcome than we thought we’d get? We’re not. [Not ready because no one has ever talked about it in principle.] So I decided to talk about it.”