From the Kyiv Jellyfish Museum

A sense of relative normalcy belies deeper problems.

In the center of Kyiv, there is a towering monument to Ukraine’s independence: A 61 meter tall marble column topped with a gold-trimmed goddess, wielding a branch of guelder rose. She is Berehynia, mother earth and protector of the homeland.

Far below, in the square, there is a nondescript door. Open it, and it reveals a staircase straight down.

When I descended below, on a sunny day in March, the landing below was crowded with a gaggle of schoolchildren. Each one had a fistful of hryvnia, shoving it towards a woman behind a plexiglass divider. She counted out their cash and returned a corresponding bauble: A button, some stickers, a stuffed jellyfish.

As I waited for these strange transactions to finish, a line formed behind me: A mother and daughter, a man in military fatigues and his wife, a tourist family from elsewhere in Ukraine.

When finally the dozen kids had finally completed their purchases, they were ushered upstairs by a teacher and I was free to enter the Museum of Jellyfish.

The four-room subterranean exhibit is not so much as a museum as it is a zoo — or, depending on your view of the noble jellyfish, maybe a botanical garden. Lit by neon lights and pounding techno, the jellyfish lazily pulsate through their small enclosures, pushed around by unseen water currents.

Though they can’t be described as intelligent or sentient — they don’t have a brain, per se — I got a bit sad watching the blobs float around through their tank. Do they know, I thought, there’s a war going on?

It is easy sometimes, jellyfish or not, to forget. Not for long, of course — an air raid siren may sound, the restaurant may close up shop a few hours ahead of the midnight curfew, you may have to present your passport to drive through a military checkpoint. But if you’re in the capital, or any of the Western Ukrainian cities which have been been far behind the frontlines since Russia’s first push collapsed in 2022, life feels more normal than it ought to.

That veneer of normalcy comes because hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have fought on the frontlines, manned the air defense systems, and destroyed Russian arms behind the frontlines. At least 31,000 have died in that fight, with more than twice that number wounded.

This week, on my final Bug-eyed and Shameless dispatch from Ukraine, I want to put aside the military strategy and the international politics. I want to talk a bit, instead, about the liminal state the Ukrainian people find themselves in.

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In Ukraine, ‘mobilization’ has become a dirty word.

For months, it has become increasingly clear that Kyiv needs to call up more soldiers to resist Russian advances and to allow war-weary fighters a break from combat.

Ukrainians were quick to volunteer to serve their country when the war broke out, and the burden they’ve had to shoulder has been enormous. Many of those who serve in frontline combat roles are on contracts which obligate them to remain in service until the war ends, with just 10 days leave per year.

As casualties mount, recruitment has slowed and pressure has been put on Kyiv to bolster its forces. The state of martial law has required that all able-bodied men from 18 to 60 must remain in the country, as they could be called up — thus far, however, only men over 27 have been drafted. Meanwhile, Russia has pressed hundreds of thousands more citizens into service, without much thought for their lives or the consequences. Ukraine, concerned with both, has been frozen with indecision on how best to match that threat.

Last year, Zelensky ordered his military to come up with plans on how to recruit more soldiers while also ending the conscription of those who had been worn down on the frontlines. Ukraine’s military leadership came back with a pretty staggering figure: 500,000 new soldiers would be required to keep up the fight.

But here’s where things get tricky: Valery Zaluzhny, then commander of the forces, said they wouldn’t need new measures to get there. Zaluzhny insisted that returning to “what worked before” would be good enough to replenish the military’s strength, and give the frontline soldiers a break. It's not quite clear what he had in mind.

Zaluzhny may have been in the minority with that assessment. The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, for example, declared around the same time that “no recruiting can cover our needs without mobilization.”

But Zaluzhny was the military chief. So his comments punted the ball back to Zelensky. And the president, in turn, passed it off to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.

When the Rada tabled their draft bill it quickly turned into, as one lawmaker called it, “a circus." Tabled shortly before Christmas, it clocked in over 70 pages and was stuffed with big changes — a lowering of the conscription age fro 27 to 25, the creation of digital draft notices, stringent punishments for those who dodge the draft, amongst other measures. The bill provoked more than 4,000 amendments, many from Zelensky’s own party.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, an opposition legislator, called it a “parliamentary crisis.” On Telegram earlier this month, he wrote that there was an urgent need for a functional mobilization bill, but Kyiv seemed incapable of bringing it forward. “Stop playing politics,” he wrote. “We have very big problems at the front.”

The Rada has yet to pass the bill. Zaluzhny has been sacked, replaced with Oleksandr Syrsky — a man who divides opinions. Some think of his as a futurist and reformer, one who has welcomed innovation as a way to overcome a lack of personnel; others see him as a classic Soviet commander, willing to throw bodies into harms’ way, even for symbolic victory. Syrsky is now conducting a an audit of the 900,000-or-so mobilized personnel, of whom only 300,000 have seen the frontlines, to see if more can be put into combat.

Absent more soldiers, emphasis is being put on frontline medics and rapid evacuation efforts for the wounded — the sooner they can be stitched up, the sooner they can return to fighting. It’s a grim prospect.

I say mobilization has become a dirty word because it has not only managed to terrify those fearful that their son, brother, or father could be pressed into service; but also because the tumultuous effort has angered those whose loved ones are already serving. All the while, draft dodging is on the rise. (While only men can be mobilized, many women have volunteered to serve.)

Zelensky, who has enjoyed enormous wartime support, seems positively terrified at the prospect of making a decision. He’s taken action on some things: Firing conscription officials for accepting bribes, for example, and, more recently, allowing those who have fought since the war began to receive discharges. But he’s been strangely non-committal on his own mobilization bill, instead leaving it for others to push ahead.

There are signs that people are getting frustrated at the dithering. Zelensky’s sky-high popularity tumbled about 20 points in 2023, even as Zaluzhny’s stayed remarkably high, at nearly 90%. There was ample speculation that the general’s firing — and subsequent shuffling-off to London — was a bit of political self-preservation on the president’s part.

Today, only about 40% of Ukrainians think of the president as effective, per a recent SOCIS poll. Asked who they would vote for in a hypothetical election, more than 46% say Zaluzhny, who has not actually signalled his intention to enter politics, whereas just 21% say Zelensky.

Elections actually should be taking place in Ukraine right about now. They were postponed without much controversy — but that may have been a mistake. Across the border, the Kremlin just used a sham election to renew Putin’s war of aggression. In Kyiv, Zelensky had an opportunity to use a popular vote to renew the nation’s collective solidarity, and to give the population a chance to endorse a mobilization strategy. But that didn’t happen.

So now political concerns are top-of-mind, frustrations with the state of the war are mounting, and the necessary solution is likely to provoke anger.

In Simon Shuster’s excellent biography of the president, it is clear that he has two personality traits which can be significant liabilities: His self-confidence, which can bleed into stubbornness; and his desire to serve, which can manifest as an incessant need to be liked. Both of those traits seem to be hobbling him, here.

Even if Zelensky manages to step up with a political solution, the military problem is still acute. His superpower from the start of the war has been his ability to rally Ukraine’s allies: The more tanks you have, the fewer soldiers you need. That has worked well thus far, but it is showing signs of diminishing returns.

In my first two dispatches from Ukraine, I talked about how declining NATO interest threatens the entire country (Dispatch #92), but also how Kyiv’s innovations may yet snatch victory from the bear’s jaws. (Dispatch #93) So there is an intense short-term threat and a reason to panic, but a longer-term opportunity and a reason to be cautiously optimistic.

But one thing that will remain true now and later is that — between the Western military alliance, the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv, and the Russian imperialists to the East — there are 37 million people trying to figure out what the hell to do.

And there’s no obvious answer.

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At a house party in Kyiv, I found myself talking to a government employee and a veteran of the Armed Forces. Tall, imposing, intense: Towards the end of the night, he held court on the state of the war. Non-Ukrainians can’t begin to understand the horrors of the war, of course. But, he said, even many of his fellow compatriots have been blind to the realities of this conflict. The bars and restaurants in Kyiv are full, but the barracks near Avdiivka are increasingly empty. Too few are willing to do what it takes to defend the country, he said, growing visibly frustrated. As a result, all of this — gesturing to the street below — is at risk.

When SOCIS asked Ukrainians the mood of the country — whether it is stable, tense, or in imminent danger — 80% said tense, 15% said it was in imminent danger. Asked, however, about the situation in their community, and the numbers look quite different: About a third said things were stable, half said tense, one-in-ten said there was imminent danger.

The fact is that, despite the regular threat of air strikes, most of the country isn’t facing the risk of artillery fire or imminent invasion. While no one seriously believes that the war will stay static in the east, I know there’s been increasing anxiety at how quickly it is moving west.

Russian strikes have stepped up on Kharkiv, Odesa, Kramatorsk, Dnipro, and elsewhere. The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Russia is pushing forward in two directions through Donetsk, threatening to encircle a huge swath of Ukrainian territory. If they are successful, it would give Russian forces a new launching pad in the middle of Ukraine, and put its forces considerably closer to Kyiv and other major cities. More than territory, though, thousands of Ukrainians still live there. Even in cities half-ruined by shelling, regularly people still live in these settlements. Including children.

That threat is becoming clearer, I think. But so to is the fact that, absent well-trained troops and without sufficient supplies, Ukrainian military leadership is struggling.

You may have seen the glowing coverage of Ukrainian Special Forces’ proficiency in storming Russian trenches. Or, if you flip through Twitter, you may catch some drone footage showing Ukrainian fighters descending on Russian positions. Or look at the statistics on the mounting volume of Russian tanks destroyed, artillery pieces wrecked, soldiers killed.

It’s good war propaganda, and it’s all true. But so too is the fact that Ukraine’s battle-tested special forces have been substantially weakened by these risky operations. Also true that Russian forces have battered Ukrainian positions with overwhelming artillery and drones of their own. And while they may be losing it at a slower rate, every piece of Ukrainian kit destroyed is a loss they cannot afford.

Ukraine’s ardent supporters see the good news, and tend to miss the bad. Ukrainians, however, see both. They see how the Ukrainian Forces moved too slow to fortify its lines, and is now racing to catch up. They see how many Ukrainians died defending Avdiivka and Bakhmut, all in attempt to dent Russia’s seemingly-infinite reserve of personnel. They see how many Ukrainian soldiers have died storming the well-fortified trenches, but without much to show for it.

In central Kyiv, not far from the Rada, there are walls covered in portraits of the men and women who have died in this war, dating back to 2014. Go past it at any time of day, and there are groups of veterans and active-duty soldiers congregating at the wall, staring at their fallen comrades. Similar portraits can be found everywhere in Ukraine — on bus shelters, on billboards, on makeshift memorials. You can see the cost of this war everywhere.

It would be wrong to come down in absolutes, here. No, Ukrainians have not, at least from what I’ve heard, given up on this war. And, no, they have not lost faith in Zelensky nor the Armed Forces. No, they have not grown to hate those who work in the capital as others fight on the frontlines.

The right word, I think, is frustrated. Frustrated that they have wound up here, frustrated that there are no good options ahead, frustrated that their allies have grown bored of supporting their struggle, frustrated that huge swaths of the country lay in ruin, frustrated that imperialism is on the march and all the flowery promises about democracy and freedom have meant so very little.

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In the face of all this death, there is only one natural reaction: How do we get peace?

A sure-fire way to cut through the frustration in Ukraine is to ask about the prospect of peace negotiations. It's sure to elicit a laugh.

Armchair experts in the West, who are loath to listen to any actual Ukrainians so long as they can stay misinformed by a steady stream of OSINT Twitter accounts and talking heads, have devised all kinds of equitable peace deals in their heads. Maybe if Ukraine gives up Crimea and swears off NATO, then all this killing will end, they think. Maybe if he just let eastern Ukraine choose its own destiny, Russia will be happy.

Satisfied with their own cleverness, they ask this strawman: Why won't Zelensky support these reasonable measures?

The problem is, Kyiv tried all this. Before the war began, Zelensky and his team agreed to a plan to hold elections in the Donbas — when it faced a setback, after the Rada rejected the plan in 2020, Russia simply blew up the negotiations altogether.

After the war began, talks in Istanbul saw Zelensky offer the very things that Putin said he wanted: A neutral Ukraine and a vow to never join NATO. Zelensky offered to freeze the question of Crimea, essentially accepting Russian occupation. Even after the images of the atrocities in Bucha came to light, Ukrainian negotiators continued trying to make a deal.¹

But, ultimately, it became clear that Putin doesn’t want a deal. He wants to conquer. The fact that so many on the political left, an ideology defined by anti-imperialism, seem incapable of grasping that idea is extremely depressing.

Last year, Zelensky unveiled a 10-point peace plan, which calls for a complete end to the hostilities and prosecution for Russian war crimes.

Russia has largely ignored the plan, until earlier this month.

Dmitry Medvedev, a long-suffering Putin stooge, responded with a 10-point plan of his own. He proposed that peace would come from “unconditional surrender,” “forced de-Nazification,” “the impossibility of any of [Ukraine’s] legal successors joining military alliances without the consent of Russia,” “payments to the relatives of the dead citizens of our country", “official recognition by the interim parliament of ‘Ukraine’ that its entire territory is the territory of the Russian Federation,” and a raft of other absurd proposals.

The proposal was played off as a joke. But it is deadly serious. For Russia, peace will only come from victory.

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A popular print of Melusine, a serpent goddess.

In the myth of Mélusine, a beautiful young girl is cursed to spend every Saturday in her true form: Half-human, half-snake. She could live a perfectly happy life, she knows, so long as her future husband never sees her true self.

Count Raymondin of Poitou, the man she marries, abides by this condition for some time — ultimately, however, he grows jealous and paranoid. Sure she is hiding a secret, he peers in her chamber as she bathes, and catches her supernatural figure.

Mélusine knows of the betrayal, but opts to forgive it. That is, until grief leads Raymondin to accost her: “You deceitful serpent,” he shouts.

It was then that Raymondin sealed his own fate. “Our love has turned to hatred, our tenderness into contempt, our solace and our joy into tearful remorse,” Mélusine tells him. “Our good fortune into irreversible calamity.”

Vowing to never see him again, but promising to spend the rest of her days watching over their sons in the Poitou castle, Mélusine transforms into a dragon and flies off.

The story of Mélusine had long been a popular staple of European folklore, but became established myth when it was compiled into a book by Jean d'Arras in the 14th century, for the French court.

“Both France and England were weary of war,” write academics Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox. “And a negotiated reconfiguration of long-disputed Aquitaine [a former region of France] reemerged as the major issue in the attempt to reach an enduring settlement between them.”²

Scholars suspect that d’Arras’ Mésuline was an attempt to use lore to bolster France’s claim to the region, which included Poitou. But the story proved popular in broader European culture, and wound up translated and reprinted multiple times across the continent. The story of Mélusine became a parable of how distrust and jealousy can ruin European harmony, but also how even a soft-mannered maiden can be a fearsome protector.

When the myth of Mésuline pops up in Russian prints around the 17th century, it takes on a bit of a different form. While the French write about her as more of a mermaid, the Russians imagine Mélusine as a half-fish creature with snake heads for feet, capable of firing poison “most cruel and deadly.”³

The Russians mix Mésuline with the Greek myth of Medusa. The combination becomes similar to, as the Ukrainians write it, медузи, or meduza:

The jellyfish.

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That’s it for this third and final dispatch from Ukraine.

I’m finishing it up back home in Montréal, recovering from the jet lag.

I’ll be writing up plenty from this trip for WIRED and Foreign Policy, so stay tuned for that.

For the Globe & Mail, I penned a lengthy column about the urgent need for Canada to step up and provide more for Ukraine. Give it a read, and share it around.

I’ll have some more interesting Russia/Ukraine dispatches here in the near future, but I’ll also be turning attention back to the calamity closer to home. So you have that to look forward to.

For those who have yet to upgrade to a paying subscription, I’m offering this special deal because you read through the European folklore epilogue. Take advantage now, as it expires next week:

Until next time.

1. The Showman, Simon Shuster

2. Melusine; or, The Noble History of Lusignan, Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox

3. Фольклор и книжность: Миф и исторические реалии, Olga Vladislavovna Belova