Kyiv, Ukraine – Halyna is ready to abandon her dreams of returning home in exchange for peace in the rest of Ukraine.“I want this nightmare to be over. I don’t want to hear air raid sirens almost every night and read about dead children and people burned alive in their homes almost every morning,” said the 35-year-old who withheld her last name because she “doesn’t want to sound unpatriotic”.
“I want peace, even if it means we can’t ever go back home,” she told Al Jazeera.
Halyna hails from the southern port of Mariupol, the large Ukrainian city Russia seized in May 2022 after a three-month siege and attacks that killed thousands of people.
She is among 56 percent of Ukrainians who would agree to a “compromise” to end Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since 1945, according to a survey released on Thursday by the Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and the SOCIS Center for Social and Marketing Research, both Kyiv-based pollsters.
The “compromise” means that Kyiv would have to agree to Russia’s de facto control of almost a fifth of Ukraine’s territory.
Another 16.6 percent of those polled would agree to a freeze along the current front lines, and only 12.8 percent want Kyiv to fight until it wins back all the land Russia has seize …
