PSCRP-BESA Reports No 167 (November 24, 2025)
By Alexander Shpunt
In the first part of our study we examined the social and political role of “SVO veterans” in the contemporary political and public landscape of Russia. We concluded that this role is not only significant—it is configurational and systemic, and it is not painted strictly in black or white. This article focuses on the other side of the conflict in southeastern Russia and Ukraine and presents an analysis of the social and political roles of veterans of the conflict within Ukrainian politics and society—today and in the near future.
Overcoming vs. Betrayal
To understand the context of the role and patterns of presence of conflict veterans in Ukrainian politics and society, it is first necessary to show the systemic difference in how society perceives the conflict itself and, even more importantly, its future outcome—whatever that outcome may be in geographic or geopolitical terms.
For Russian society, this conflict has already ended in victory. The paradigm of standing against the whole world with its own “Russian truth” is a historical model of perceiving reality in Russia, going back to the Napoleonic Wars and the confrontation with a coalition of states in the Crimean Wars. This is not a Bolshevik invention—the Bolsheviks merely made use of an already deeply rooted paradigm. And in this new round of confrontation, the current generation has endured—just as their ancestors did. Therefore, interpreting this self-perception of Russians as victors solely as the result of agitation or propaganda would be a mistake and an oversimplification, as such a view ignores the centuries-long context.
According to a sociological study conducted by Russian Field, there is no single, fully formed image of victory in Russian society. Respondents defined victory in the SVO as: the annexation of part of Ukraine’s territory and securing new territories for the state (almost one-third of those surveyed); the complete capitulation of Ukraine (13%); “achieving peace so that everyone stays alive” (12.1%); the cessation of Ukraine as a state (9%); the withdrawal of troops and cessation of hostilities (5.9%); the elimination of fascism and a peace agreement on Moscow’s terms (5%); overthrowing the current Ukrainian government (4%); the situation in which Russia and Ukraine now find themselves means “there is no victory” (4%); NATO’s borders being pushed westward (3%); achieving the demobilization and denazification of Ukraine (3%). Such a broad spectrum of symbolic meanings of victory creates a situation in which the attainment of any one of these results can already be perceived as the achievement of victory.
In contrast, perceptions of the conflict’s outcome in Ukraine are increasingly shaped by a narrative of betrayal—by America, Europe, Ukrainian oligarchs, Zelensky; the list can go on. As is perhaps true for any nation, it is difficult for Ukrainians to attribute objective battlefield setbacks to the fault of their own soldiers—this is what forms the narrative framework of “systemic betrayal,” under which the army is fighting. There is no error here, nor a weakness in the Ukrainian government’s propaganda system, nor the influence of some external force—we see the same pattern of perceiving one’s soldiers as heroes acting against a backdrop of external betrayal in dozens of modern conflicts, from the Middle East to the former Yugoslavia and Africa.
Thus, for Ukrainian society—we emphasize, regardless of any objectively realistic outcome—the conflict does not end in victory, because the causes and consequences of betrayal, as well as the actors responsible for it, do not disappear. In early 2024, Ruslan Bortnyk, Director of the Ukrainian Institute for Analysis and Management of Policy, said in an interview with the YouTube channel “Novini Live”:
“Data from sociological surveys show that Ukraine has already lost the information war to Russia… We are losing faith in the future of Ukraine, faith in victory <…> both inside Ukraine and outside Ukraine — all the sociology shows this.”
At the same time, it should be noted that this does not imply defeatism in Ukrainian society. The country sees itself as fighting and demonstrating heroism in this struggle. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Centre in August 2025, almost 73% of respondents believe in the possibility of Ukraine’s victory in the conflict with Russia. However, the substance of what constitutes “victory” looks quite different from what one might assume.
For most respondents, the three main signs of Ukraine’s victory in the conflict would be the return of all Ukrainian prisoners, the deported and the kidnapped (37%), the preservation of Ukrainian statehood (31%), and the cessation of missile attacks on Ukraine (29%).
According to another survey conducted in June by the SOCIS Center, the Janus Institute, and the publication Barometer of Public Sentiment,
the majority of Ukrainians — 72.3% — support ending the conflict along the current front line. Among them, 55.7% support seeking a compromise solution with the participation of international mediators, while 16.6% are in favor of temporarily freezing the conflict at its current positions. Continuing military action is supported by 21.4% of respondents: 12.8% — until the 1991 borders are restored, and 8.6% — until the line of 23 February 2022 is reached.
Two different visions of the conflict’s outcome — “victory as the result of resilience against the whole world” (Russians) and “forced concessions despite heroism at the front, caused by widespread and multifaceted betrayal” (Ukrainians) — produce two different contexts for how conflict veterans are incorporated into the political and social framework. It is important to stress that we are speaking here strictly about social perception. Assessing the real future outcomes of the conflict, its course, and especially its causes lies outside the scope of this paper.
A Party of Generals? No — Parties of Generals
Public trust in the Armed Forces of Ukraine had remained consistently high since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and Ukraine’s military operation in Donbas began. By 2015, 55% of Ukrainians reported in surveys that they trusted the armed forces.
This figure was high but not extraordinary — in the same poll, the Church surpassed the army (62%), and public institutions and media nearly matched it (46% and 45% respectively). However, in 2022 a dramatic shift occurred — trust in the Armed Forces of Ukraine rose to an unprecedented 95%.
Not only the political class but also the population at large wants veterans to enter active politics. A survey conducted on 2 September 2024 by the Razumkov Centre and the Ilko Kucheriv Foundation for the CHESNO movement showed that 70% of citizens view the entry of veterans into politics positively; only 8% — ten times fewer — view this negatively. Figures associated with the active military have become a highly sought-after political resource across the entire spectrum of Ukrainian politics.
At the same time, there is an accumulated but not yet realizable potential for electoral pressure. Elections remain suspended under wartime conditions. Ukrainian law does not allow presidential elections under martial law. Martial law has been extended in 90-day intervals since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, with parliamentary approval, and very recently (as of November 2025) it was extended for the 17th time, until 3 February 2026.
So what political offer is being shaped by the “veteran elite” and by grassroots veterans as opinion leaders? Here we again find a systemic divergence from the position of SVO veterans in Russian politics. In Russia, SVO veterans constitute a stable, almost monolithic, and active bloc of support for the authorities and for President Putin personally. Numerous attempts by both systemic and non-systemic opposition forces to draw any high-profile SVO veterans into their orbit have failed. This is not due to the weakness of the opposition or to obstacles imposed by the regime — it is the societal perception of the SVO, discussed at the beginning of our analysis, that resists such attempts.
The situation in Ukraine is structurally different. The same “electoral bottleneck” — the repeated cancellation of elections and, more broadly, the suspension of political life — has electrified and polarized the political environment. A high-profile poll by the Rating Sociological Group,
conducted 21–23 August 2025, showed that trust in Zaluzhny stands at 74%, compared to 68% for Zelensky and 59% for the head of Ukrainian intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov. Meanwhile, according to the same poll, if presidential elections were held, Zelensky would receive the most support (35.2% among all respondents), with Zaluzhny in second place (25.3%). The chart shows that since July 2025 Zelensky’s rating rose from 30.7% to 35.2%, while Zaluzhny’s rating also increased, though less significantly — from 24.8% to 25.3%.
Two national leaders — one leading in trust, the other in electoral preference — represent a vivid indicator of political polarization at the level of choosing the head of state. And in this process, out of the three leading figures, two are generals of the southeastern conflict: Budanov and Zaluzhny.
The party-political landscape shows the same pattern. According to the same poll, in parliamentary elections a hypothetical “Zaluzhny Party” would take first place with 23.7%, followed — with a significant gap — by a hypothetical Zelensky Bloc at 19.7%. Behind them would be “European Solidarity” (7.4%), a hypothetical Budanov Party (6.4%), and the Azov Party (5.9%). As we can see, three out of the five parties that would currently pass into parliament — if elections were held today — are parties led by generals-veterans.
Response of the authorities
The apparatus of Volodymyr Zelensky is looking for a response to the growing political ambitions of veteran-politicians and the growing social influence of veterans who are opinion leaders, in the same way Vladimir Putin does — by creating mechanisms to draw prominent figures from this environment into the system of power, thereby depriving opponents of the opportunity to make veterans their key political assets. In fact, this is what any government does in such situations — one only has to recall the mechanisms used to integrate Middle East war veterans into the governing structures of the United States.
The Ministry of Veterans Affairs of Ukraine, established in 2018, implements, among other things, programs that help veterans advance into government structures. The Law “On the Status of War Veterans” (No. 3551-XII, with 2022 amendments) provides for priority employment in state institutions. However, only in 2025 did discussions begin on introducing quotas for veterans in government bodies: on 25 July 2025, hearings were held on the topic “Is a legally established standard for employing war veterans necessary?” at the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada on Social Policy and Protection of Veterans’ Rights.
Back on 2 December 2024, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved at its meeting the Strategy for Veterans Policy for the period until 2030 and the Operational Action Plan for its implementation for 2024–2027. An important part of these documents consists of projects aimed at integrating veterans into the structures of public administration.
Pro-government civil society organizations are also active. The CHESNO movement, a civic organization, launched the “Veteran Leadership Program” to provide veterans with the knowledge and skills needed to participate in political and public life. The program, supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands and implemented in partnership with the Ukrainian Catholic University, includes multi-module training on topics such as the state and law, leadership, and communications. It also offers opportunities for international study, for example a program at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, to expose veterans to best global practices. This project is perhaps the closest analogue to the Russian “Time of Heroes” initiative, which we described in the first part of our study.
It should be noted that the complexities of Ukrainian bureaucracy have created a huge gap between those participants of the armed conflict in the southeast who are officially recognized as veterans and are within the scope of government reintegration efforts, and those who also participated in combat but did not receive veteran status.
Even official Ukrainian sources provide figures for the number of veterans that differ by tens or even hundreds of times. “We have a million service members, and only 40,000 received veteran status. This is very wrong,” said Vitalii Deineha, then Deputy Minister of Defense, in July 2023. This is one status with one set of benefits. As of 1 September 2025, the Unified State Register of War Veterans lists 1,326,552 people with combatant status; most received this status after 2022 — another status with another set of benefits. Meanwhile, according to UN sources, the Government of Ukraine estimates that the number of veterans and their family members may reach between five and eight million.
The reverse process is also noticeable — acting officials and deputies leaving for military service in the combat zone. Here again there is a parallel with a similar process in Russia, which we described in the first part of the report.
In the Chernivtsi City Council, 26% of deputies have served in the military. All of them perform combat missions as part of Ukraine’s military formations. The Dnipro City Council is behind Chernivtsi by only 1% in terms of deputies who have either switched to military service or combine their city council work with service in the armed forces. In the Kyiv City Council, 23% of deputies have taken this path.
A general figure was provided by Ukraine’s Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers (a minister without portfolio) Oleh Nemchinov: “In total, by the end of the year there were 3,637 such individuals (civil servants fighting in the conflict zone — ed.). Unfortunately, as of year-end, 108 civil servants had been killed, 80 wounded… more than 200 officials were considered missing.” And these are only the 2023 data; more recent figures have not been published anywhere.
Criminal context
As in Russia, in Ukraine organized crime views veterans as a traumatized and therefore vulnerable segment of society — while at the same time possessing skills valuable in the criminal environment.
But there are also significant differences between the criminal dimension of the veteran issue in Russia and in Ukraine.
For Russia, the issue of desertion from the army and living in illegal status is almost irrelevant. After the well-known attempt to conduct a partial mobilization in September 2022, which caused extremely negative processes for the authorities, including mass emigration, a decision was made to shift to a fully contract-based model for forming units in the SVO zone. This has made desertion isolated and infrequent.
In Ukraine, the situation with conscription developed differently. From the beginning of full-scale hostilities in the southeast until October 2025, law enforcement agencies registered 311,327 criminal cases against active service members (255,000 for unauthorized abandonment of a unit and 56,200 directly for desertion). According to estimates by the reputable Spanish newspaper El País, which cites information from authorities in Kyiv, about 1.5 million men of conscription age are evading service in the Ukrainian army. Thus, around one and a half to two million men are forced to live in semi-legal or illegal conditions, making them vulnerable to criminal pressure. Three hundred thousand of them are those who served in combat units in the conflict zone.
Another difference in the criminal component of the social presence of combat veterans on the Russian and Ukrainian sides is the international context. The policy of isolating Russia has led to a paradoxical result — Russian organized crime has also become “toxic” for criminal groups in other countries. The situation regarding Ukraine’s organized crime is developing differently.
In its recent report on Ukrainian veterans of the conflict, the German Marshall Fund of the United States notes the possibility of a negative scenario for the entire world, in which there will be “an increase in criminal activity among some veterans and a risk of radicalization among some of them.” And this is not a projection for the future.
The French outlet Intelligence Online reported that Mexico’s National Intelligence Center (CNI) had warned Ukraine about individuals connected to drug cartels who were voluntarily joining Ukraine’s International Legion in order to gain experience with first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones for use in their own internal wars against other cartels and Mexico’s security forces. Ukrainian authorities treated the information extremely seriously. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Main Directorate of Military Intelligence (HUR) created a specialized unit to begin a joint investigation, focusing primarily on Spanish-speaking volunteers from Colombia, Mexico, and other Central American countries.
According to Intelligence Online, citing a Slovak security source, at least three former fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) joined the International Legion using Panamanian and Venezuelan documents. One of them was eventually identified by the SBU at a drone-training center in Dnipro because his gang tattoos gave him away.
These illustrations — and they are no more than illustrations — show that the reintegration of veterans of the southeastern conflict from Russia and Ukraine, just like the conflict itself, cannot be viewed as an internal affair of Russia and Ukraine. The consequences and impact of this conflict affect the entire world.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, the great Russian and French philosopher, one of the intellectual leaders of the post-revolutionary émigré community and the author of the concept of the “new Middle Ages,” once said: “War, in itself, does not create new life; it is only the end of the old, a reflection on evil.” The twenty-first century adds a minor amendment to this statement: war does not create the new — it reassigns positions and roles for what already exists. Veterans of the conflict from Russia and from Ukraine are individuals, including political individuals, who receive such reassignment.
Alexander Shpunt is an Israeli and Russian researcher and expert in the theory and practice of information and analytical work in the field of politics and resides in Haifa. Since 2016 he has served as a professor at the National Research University “Moscow Higher School of Economics. In 1999–2011 he also served as the executive director of the “Effective Policy Foundation”, the largest think tank in the RF at that time, and in 2011 founded and headed the Institute of Political Analysis Tools, specializing in systems for monitoring political behavior.