Compassion fatigue: Is the West tired of war?
The US and its allies have provided financial and military aid to Kyiv since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began and promised to support the war-ravaged country for as long as is necessary but the Kremlin claims Western sympathy is in limited supply.
Transcript
00:00 the number of Ukrainians who believe that the West is getting tired of the war raging
00:04 on in their country has spiked. According to an October poll conducted by the Kiev International
00:09 Institute of Sociology, 30% of Ukrainians believe that the West's support has weakened.
00:14 That's up from 15% in September 2022. This so-called war fatigue is one of the Kremlin's
00:20 main propaganda narratives.
00:22 However, the majority of Ukrainians believe that Western support is strong and is unlikely
00:35 to weaken in the coming months. According to some, the EU is ready to continue providing
00:40 assistance to Kiev.
00:41 Well, of course, President Putin would like to say this. And he wants to inject a kind
00:48 of sense of hesitation or rather a sense of tiredness inside the European Union towards
00:57 Ukraine. But I'm not so sure sitting here in Berlin that the fatigue is deep-rooted
01:04 enough, that it's wide enough. But the sense that the war has gone on long enough is out
01:11 there among the member states. But it's not deep enough and wide enough to actually
01:18 say, to come to the point where the Europeans say enough is enough. Let's negotiate.
01:23 It's so important to have a good understanding of what's at stake in the conflict, which
01:28 isn't just the future security order of Europe and the potential for more Russian
01:33 aggression, but is also around the economic and political systems that Ukrainians are
01:38 fighting for the reform of and fighting to join together with their European neighbors.
01:43 This is a conflict worth supporting Ukraine in because the alternative in which Putin
01:48 wins and destroys that country will lead not only to a shattering of the European security
01:53 paradigm, but the political and economic paradigm across Europe as well.
01:58 In early October, representatives of the EU member states visited Kiev for the first-ever
02:03 summit of EU foreign ministers outside the bloc, an act read as a sign of solidarity
02:09 and support for Ukraine.
02:10 (electronic music)