Ukraine Can Recover With Bolder Support - But Now It's On The Ropes

The mood in Ukraine is sombre these days.

- Timothy Garton Ash

The casualties keep mounting. In the military cemetery in Lviv, I see widows and bereaved mothers sitting silently beside the fresh graves of their loved ones, heads bowed, a life sentence of suffering etched on their faces. Medical experts estimate that at least half the population is suffering from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Vladimir Putin's forces are grinding forward, using their numerical advantages and exploiting the slowness of the west to supply sufficient air defence and ammunition. They have opened a new front north of Kharkiv, which is closer to the Russian frontier than London is to Oxford. It's feared that Russian forces will now get within artillery range of the besieged city, which is already being pounded by Russian missiles, drones and glide bombs.

Russia's main purpose seems to be to stretch the roughly 1,000km-long frontline so that, as Ukraine diverts troops to defend Kharkiv, Putin's army can push forward in the east, taking more of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces that he already claims are irrevocably part of the Russian Federation. One western military expert says this is a "moment of jeopardy" for Ukraine.

Major Andriy Pidlisnyi, a battalion commander who's been on active service since the first days of the full-scale war, tells me the mood among his troops is "not good". And, he adds: "They think it's time for others to go and fight." But where are those others? A hotly contested law reducing the conscription age to 25 has finally come into force, but wherever I turn I hear stories of young Ukrainian men trying to avoid the draft.