When Tymofii Postoiuk and his friends set up an online fundraising effort for Ukraine, donations poured in from around the globe, helping to purchase essential equipment for the Ukrainian armed forces.
As the fighting with Russia wore on and war fatigue set in, the donations slowed down, but money continued to come in steadily. Then the Israel-Hamas war broke out on Oct. 7.
With the start of another major conflict, social media networks including X, formerly known as Twitter, were flooded with news from the Middle East. “Our fundraising posts and updates simply get lost in between those tweets,” Postoiuk said.
People lose interest in war
The result has been a broad shift in the world’s attention away from Ukraine to the fighting in Gaza — a trend that worries many Ukrainians.
They fear that a combination of global fatigue, competing political agendas and limited resources will result in less aid for their military, hurting the country’s ability to sustain its confrontation with Russia.
“The longer we talk about our war, the less interest it holds for people,” said 21-year-old Ivan Mahuriak, who lives in Lviv in western Ukraine. Like many other Ukrainians, he feels as if the world stopped paying attention to the war in Ukraine even before the Hamas attack on Israel.
The fatigue, he said, arises from the fact that dynamics on the ground are significantly less than in 2022, when Ukrainian armed forces managed to completely or partially push Russians out of several regions.
“In some places, the front line is still. But that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening,” he said. His brother, two cousins, several colleagues and friends are in the Ukrainian military and continue to fight Russian troops.
This year’s much-touted counteroffensive, which took off in June, has progressed at a much slower pace, with Ukrainian troops struggling to dislodge Russians who are entrenched in captured territory.
Additional US funding for Ukraine is jeopardised by political fights in Washington, where the new war consumes attention at the highest levels.
Divisions
Divisions over Ukraine have also emerged in the European Union, which says it cannot provide all the munitions it promised. EU summits and other high-level global meetings now tend to focus on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
United States President Joe Biden has made a point of linking US support for Israel and Ukraine, saying both are vital for national security. Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, paid an official visit to Ukraine on Nov. 8 to show that the U.S. commitment has not wavered.
“The fact that I am here is one way to demonstrate that, in addition to the great concern and attention that we have toward what is going on in the Middle East, we have as much attention, focus and commitment as we have ever had right here to Ukraine,” he said, standing outside of St. Michael’s Church in Kiev.
