Do Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure weaken the resolve of Ukrainian citizens? Drawing on new survey data, Philipp Chapkovski and Ivan S. Grigoriev find that while the multiple hardships caused by the war weigh heavily on the happiness of Ukrainians, they do not shake their core belief in victory.
War is not only fought on battlefields – it’s waged in the hearts and minds of those enduring its consequences. Every missile strike, air raid and blackout has a dual purpose. The first is the obvious military goal: destroying critical infrastructure, crippling logistical capacities and weakening an opponent’s ability to resist.
But the second, often undeclared aim, is to target something more intangible – the will of the civilian population. By breaking their spirit, aggressors hope to turn despair into a weapon, using public pressure as leverage to force decision-makers to seek peace on unfavourable terms.
This dual strategy is evident in the tactics employed by Russia in its war against Ukraine. While Moscow frames its strikes on energy infrastructure as “military necessities” and sometimes as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes against military targets inside Russia, it is hard not to see them as primarily targeting the civilian population. This is especially apparent since the Kremlin consistently begins bombing Ukraine’s critical infrastructure ahead of the winter months, presumably to maximise the impact on civilians during the cold season.
Almost as a slip of the tongue, when asked about the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians due to such attacks for the first time in 2022, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that “the Ukrainian leadership… had all possibilities to settle the situation in such a way as to fulfil the demands of the Russian side and stop, respectively, all possible suffering of the civilians”. The underlying question is chilling: can terrorising ordinary Ukrainians make them give up hope and pressure their government to surrender?
Measuring the impact of hardship
This question speaks to a more general one about effectiveness and consequences of civilian victimisation in warfare. For a long time, there was an agreement among scholars that “killing civilians in war” is a “bad strategy”.
However, later quantitative research into both inter- and intra-state conflicts suggested that, unless victimisation is excessive, targeting civilian populations might actually help states achieve victory in the wars they fight. Finally, in his authoritative review of the new wave of scholarship on political violence, Benjamin Valentino concedes that “whether large-scale violence against civilians ‘works’” is one of the “critical questions in the field of political violence [that] remain unstudied”.
In a recent study, we aimed to explore this question. By tracking the daily emotions, hardships, and beliefs of approximately 1,000 Ukrainians over a month, we examined how war-related challenges such as air raids and blackouts affected their well-being, expectations for the future and determination in the face of war. The findings tell a story of resilience. While the constant barrage of hardships weighs heavily on Ukrainians’ happiness and hopes, it does not shake their core belief in victory.
Wartime experiences
To understand how war-related stress impacts the attitudes and resilience of Ukrainians, we conducted a panel study between 20 December 2024 and 9 January 2025. The timing of the survey ensured it could provide a glimpse into what Ukrainians really think about the war.
The survey came after a period of relatively open deliberation about such perspectives that, judging by the publicly available surveys, started roughly in late summer 2024. Prior to that, respondents could not realistically be expected to reveal that they did not believe in Ukraine’s victory, or, more importantly, to discuss on which terms they would support peace or even a ceasefire.
Participants were recruited through BeSample, a platform with direct access to thousands of Ukrainians via a Telegram bot. This bot facilitated survey distribution and provided participants with rewards through a bonus system.
While the recruitment process allowed us to gather a substantial sample quickly, it also introduced a notable limitation: due to the ongoing military draft, high rates of full-time employment among men (which can sometimes exempt them from conscription) and possibly a desire by some men to remain “off the grid” in Ukraine, our sample was overwhelmingly female. Over 93% of participants were women. While we retained the very small number of men (65) in the analysis, the conclusions of this study primarily reflect the experiences and attitudes of Ukrainian women.
The design of our study included an initial detailed survey with 997 participants that asked questions about their expectations and attitudes toward the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including personal forecasts about how and when they believed the war would end, as well as basic demographic information. We then repeated the questions about their estimate of the military and political situation in Ukraine in a follow-up survey twenty days later. This allowed us to examine changes in individual beliefs over time and assess whether exposure to war-related stress influenced shifts in attitudes.
To capture their experiences during the three weeks of the study, this design was complemented with an element of Mobile Experience Sampling Method (MESM). Starting two days after the initial survey, participants were invited to complete a brief survey every other day, lasting less than a minute. These daily surveys tracked the participants’ self-reported emotions, including happiness and hope, as well as their experiences of stressful events in the last 24 hours, categorised into war-related (air raid alerts, electricity blackouts, collapse of basic services) and non-war-related events (both positive and negative). To our knowledge, this is the first use of MESM to study wartime experiences in real time.
This longitudinal design allows us to analyse within-person changes and determine whether the intensity of war-related stress events predict shifts in beliefs about the war’s outcome, particularly toward more defeatist perspectives. Here we present the early results of the study, focusing on two questions: almost three years into the war, do Russian attacks affect the subjective well-being of ordinary Ukrainians? And if they do, does this convert into an increased willingness to accept defeat in the war? To use Valentino’s term, does the Russian use of civilian victimisation in its war against Ukraine “work”?
A complex picture
Our findings reveal a relatively complex relationship between air raids, self-reported emotional well-being (in this text, we focus on happiness levels, though other traits were also measured) and the likelihood of changing attitudes and expectations about the war’s outcome.
We find that happiness is reduced as air raids increase. The more air raids participants reported experiencing, the lower was their average self-reported happiness over the entire period of the study. This decline is clear in the data, showing how repeated exposure to such stressors can weigh heavily on emotional well-being. With every additional raid, life feels a bit grimmer – a clear emotional toll of living under constant threat.
Figure 1: Average happiness level and number of air raid alerts reported
Note: The blue line indicates a trend of decreasing happiness as the number of air raid alerts increased.
However, when it comes to opinions about the war’s outcome, the story is more nuanced. For those who already believed in Ukraine’s victory (63% of our sample), their confidence remained solid. No matter how many air raids or peaceful days they experienced, the likelihood they would stop believing in victory remained stable and relatively low: their belief in eventual victory barely wavered.
On the flip side, the situation was very different for participants who were either doubtful about Ukraine’s chances or preferred not to answer the question (suggesting, presumably, that they did not quite believe in victory but did not want to say this). For this group, each peaceful day without air raids nudged them closer to believing in Ukraine’s success. In contrast, our data suggest that air raids deepened their doubts, which might be interpreted by the aggressor, Russia, as evidence of their strategy’s effectiveness.
Figure 2: Effect of air raids on opinions about the outcome of the war
Note: The chart indicates that those who believed Ukraine would lose the war or did not answer the question became more likely to believe in Ukraine’s success as the number of days without reported air raids increased.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, bombing does lower happiness, but it doesn’t crack the confidence of those who firmly believe in Ukraine’s victory. Instead, it seems to deepen the divide: pushing the undecided or sceptical further into doubt, while leaving the majority who believe in Ukraine unshaken. This finding underscores the resolve of most ordinary Ukrainians, but also the complexity of using terror tactics to influence civilian morale – it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Vitaliy Holovin / Shutterstock.com
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