Azov commander: Stop counting kilometers—Ukraine’s real war is psychological

Lt. Col. Arsen Dmytryk, Chief of Staff of Ukraine's 1st Azov Corps and survivor of the 2022 Olenivka prison massacre, has issued a stark warning: Ukrainians are viewing their war through the wrong lens—and it's eroding their capacity to endure.

In a recent essay, Dmytryk argues that Ukrainian society remains trapped in a "simplistic, almost infantile idea of war"—evaluating a long-term attritional conflict with metrics designed for short, decisive campaigns.

The frontline—those colored patches on DeepState that Ukrainians refresh obsessively—is only one indicator, and "far from always the determining one," Dmytryk writes. The real shifts occur deeper: in the preservation of statehood, institutional flexibility, and transformation from aid recipient to what he calls "a full-fledged geostrategic actor."

None of this shows up in territorial statistics.

Ukraine's Stockdale Paradox

To explain what Ukrainians need, Dmytryk invokes the Stockdale Paradox—a concept from Admiral James Stockdale, the highest-ranking American POW in Vietnam. Asked who didn't survive captivity, Stockdale replied: "The optimists... They said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then Easter. Then Thanksgiving. And they died of a broken heart."

The Stockdale Paradox entails the following: survival requires holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously—unflinching acknowledgment of brutal reality, and unwavering faith in eventual victory.

"If you seriously allow the idea that the enemy's victory is the most likely option, your personal psyche slowly begins to collapse under the constant pressure of the imaginary inevitability," Dmytryk writes.

For Dmytryk—who was evacuated from Olenivka "with his face caked in dried blood"—this isn't abstract philosophy.

The state's failure in communicating to citizens

Dmytryk's sharpest criticism targets Ukraine's government messaging. Every day, Ukrainians face hundreds of war-related messages with millions of views. But who is helping them process this correctly?

"The lack of explanations here guarantees a critical problem in the form of loss of resilience for the future," he writes.

The problem is real. What Western media calls "war fatigue" is often disorientation caused by policy failures—like open-ended mobilization with no clear service terms—rather than exhaustion with the war itself. Meanwhile, Russia pumps $1.4 billion annually into propaganda designed to erode morale, and ISW has documented Putin's coordinated psychological warfare campaign aimed at convincing Ukraine and the West that Russian victory is inevitable.

Dmytryk's prescription: abandon the metric of kilometers gained in favor of indicators showing preservation of Ukrainian forces and disproportionate enemy losses. The state's task "should be to cultivate ways of adapting to the situation, and not to support empty optimism."

The key metric in a war of attrition, Dmytryk argues, is adaptation speed—the ability to change faster than the enemy. Ukraine has compressed its adaptation cycles from years to months. Russia relied on numerical superiority; instead, its operations choked. This is what winning looks like in attrition warfare—even when the map doesn't show it.

"We do not yet know when and how this war will end," Dmytryk concludes. "But we know one thing for sure: Ukrainian resilience must not end and become a thing of the past with the war."

Former Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who led Ukraine's military through the first two years of the full-scale invasion and now serves as ambassador to the UK, has made similar arguments. He warned that Russia's attrition strategy is not primarily military but political and economic—designed to trigger Ukraine's internal disintegration. The Kremlin, he wrote, is trying to create social tension and excessive expenditure through military operations, with civil war as the ultimate blow.

Putin himself still believes Russia can outlast both Ukraine and the West. Dmytryk's words are a reminder that proving him wrong requires not just weapons and soldiers, but a society that understands what kind of war it's actually fighting.