On the eve of the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, I find myself wondering whether my country will still exist in another 35 years. Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, the rollback of democracy, a severely damaged market economy, and the degradation of every social system compel me, as a Ukrainian woman, to ask whether Ukraine will survive another 35 years if the status quo remains unchanged.

When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, its population stood at 52mn—larger than neighbouring Poland and twice the combined population of Hungary, the Baltic states, and Belarus. Today the official figure is only 20–25mn and declining rapidly. Last year alone the country officially lost 800,000 people—roughly half a million through death and 300 thousand through emigration—while the birth rate was three times lower than the death rate. This year the trend continues: a quarter of a million new refugees in the first half of the year alone, and births now running four times lower than deaths.

Meanwhile, nearly 12mn residents—more than half the population—are pensioners or people with disabilities. The war is draining the country’s last reserves of strength. On one side is life under constant, brutal Russian attacks; on the other is an economy short of people, without reliable electricity, with outdated healthcare lacking doctors, and with education inaccessible in full to a third of Ukrainian children.

The militarization of the economy—prioritizing weapons production while remaining wholly dependent on Western funding—cannot attract, support, or be accepted by the entire population. The only “value added” seems to be produced in endless social-media posts and videos of explosions inside Russia.

Ukraine’s external debt and poverty keep rising. According to the latest World Bank data, poverty has climbed from 36% to 41%.

That is why Ukraine today stands at a crossroads. One possible path is Finland; the other is Afghanistan.

Finland once lost battles and territory. The defeat was crushing and painful. Yet Finland won its nation and its future.

By contrast, the West today is supporting a strategy of Ukraine’s obvious defeat along Afghan lines. Twenty years of war and a trillion dollars in Western aid produced dependence in Kabul rather than sovereignty, an absence of genuine leadership, tolerance of the corruption that hollowed out Kabul’s institutions, and the censorship deemed necessary for “support.” The result was an Afghan government that, after many years of Western backing, could not stand against the Taliban on its own.

Today’s Western strategies are moving Ukraine down that very same road. Our institutions are buckling under corruption and a self-assured autocracy; our people are fleeing and losing their faith; and Russia keeps advancing. We lose territory and we lose people every single day, without pause—and with them, our chance at a future.

To defend the policies Ukraine is pursuing today is to defend a status quo that is an Afghanistan path for Ukraine and a historical shame for the West. This policy has turned Ukraine into a country without political or economic agency. If nothing changes urgently, the country is unlikely to withstand even a few more years of such a brutal war in its hot phase. There will simply be no one left to defend it.

Have any of the Western experts who defend the current strategies performed even the most basic arithmetic? If Ukraine still has 25mn people under the most optimistic estimates, of whom 12mn are pensioners or disabled and another 5mn are children under 18, then the adult population is at most 7mn—perhaps 9mn if we remain optimists. Among them, half are men. The current strategy therefore assumes that 3.5-4.5mn Ukrainian men must defeat a Russia of more than 140mn people that has 38–42mn men of mobilization age. In other words, an average of 4mn Ukrainians against an average of 40mn Russians.

On top of that, Russia actively recruits soldiers from poorer countries and offers financial incentives for joining the army—$10,000—that Ukrainians can only dream of.

Neither logic, nor history, nor even the film ‘300’ teaches anything to those who, from the comfort of the West, insist on fighting Russia with Ukrainian lives. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians I know and talk to every day oppose this approach.

In 35 years, Ukraine has never developed a coherent political ideology. With only a blurred understanding of liberal and conservative values, the Ukrainian political class operates on pathological populism as its main principle of governance. Yet never has the degradation of politics been as severe as during this war.

The radicalization of society, the promotion of war as the only possible form of existence, militarization, and the artificial elevation of controversial historical figures as a new ideology of the present—all of this divides Ukrainian society and drives many more people to consider leaving. Such artificial constructs may produce interesting profiles in Western liberal media, but they cannot save Ukraine from catastrophe.

Nevertheless, the Ukrainian nation—from Donbas to nationalist Lviv and Volyn’—has always gravitated toward conservative-centrist positions. The family as the foundation of society, the church in its various branches as the foundation of faith, and the acceptance of new cultures, ethnicities, and religions as the foundation of community—these remain the things that unite Ukrainians, together with the shared horrific history in which every family carries terrible stories of the Nazi crimes during WW2 and the Holodomor and repressions engineered by Stalin’s Soviet Union. This common ground could become the factor that unites people around an ideological platform natural to Ukraine—one capable not only of saving the country and its future but of guaranteeing lasting stability.

Ukraine can and should become a frontier between the West and Russia. Extremes have never been popular among Ukrainians, a nation of innovation and agribusiness. A strong pull toward education (in the 2010s more than 80% of Ukrainians held higher-education degrees), innovativeness (it was a Ukrainian who led the first program to launch a human into space), and the agricultural sector (rich black soil, chernozem, covers roughly 60–65% of Ukraine’s total land area and over 65% of its arable land) have long been Ukrainian strengths. Total disregard for human life in war has been Russia’s strength.

Ukraine needs more than territorial compromises to achieve peace. It needs leadership that prioritizes the intellectual possibilities of legal nuances and agreements in order to preserve diplomacy and the strategic chance of recovering territory. Above all, it needs measures that preserve people and enable the realistic return of those who have become refugees. Ukraine needs the restoration of democracy, elections, economic recovery, and hope for the future.

Current strategies do not merely undermine all of this while propping up an unsustainable status quo; they lead Ukraine directly toward military, social, and intellectual collapse.

A future of winter humanitarian crisis, further mass emigration, growing numbers of graves, and widespread societal PTSD is steadily approaching. Strategically, people with conservative ideologies are coming to power in the West—people who do not support this unjustified and brutal war, many of whom understand that it cannot be won militarily. This means that if Ukraine does not take its own future into its hands and build new strategies, it will lose partners as quickly as it is losing people.

Iuliia Mendel is a journalist and Zelenskiy’s former press secretary. She posts on X at @IuliiaMendel.