Earlier this month, Lina Yaroslavska, who works at a non-governmental organization in Lviv, in Western Ukraine, wrote on Facebook that she was full of fear after her ex-husband was drafted in the latest wave of mobilization for the conflict in the country’s eastern regions. “He said he was ready to defend Ukraine. I have a lot of questions about who is defending whom,” Yaroslavska wrote. “For me, this seems like a kind of sacrifice, one in which the Church also participates, by giving its blessing: those who have power over the people pluck up guys, and, whether or not you want to, whether or not you can, you’re sent to this dragon to be devoured.”

With a rapidly increasing number of casualties in the conflict that began in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution, last winter, more and more Ukrainian women are thinking about this dragon. (On Thursday morning, French, German, Russian, and Ukrainian leaders announced a new ceasefire agreement; it remains to be seen whether both sides will abide by it. The last ceasefire, in September, proved largely ineffective.) In January, I met up with an old acquaintance, Lena K., at a café in Kiev, across the street from her office. She told me straight off that the past year had almost killed her. First, there were the Maidan protests, in which she was intensively involved, coördinating medical aid for the wounded protesters. Then, in August, her husband, the father of their young daughter, had been drafted. Lena didn’t want him to go, and she knew that you could buy your way out of the draft; this was Ukraine, after all, one of the most corrupt countries in the world. She’d heard rumors that even some military personnel had managed to escape mobilization. But Lena’s husband, who had no real military training, only some theoretical knowledge of artillery, said that he wanted to defend his country. The Ukrainian Army provides almost no equipment to its conscripts, so Lena and her husband scrambled to purchase several thousand dollars’ worth of supplies—a good helmet, boots, camouflage, a bulletproof vest, sleeping bags, hemostatic bandages—and to procure prescription painkillers. After three weeks of training, her husband was sent to Donbass. He has now been on duty for four months, without any break or hope of rotation.

Lena and her husband were lucky to have the money and connections to get the necessary equipment and supplies; but they couldn’t do anything about the broader problems of lack of training or experience in the armed forces. There’s still plenty of patriotism and bluster, but many Ukrainians are frightened, furious, and desperate for the yearlong conflict with the Russia-backed separatists to end. In Kiev, I talked with a number of people who were worried about being drafted in the next wave of mobilization, which has been accompanied by a new crackdown on draft dodgers. “I don’t want to be cannon fodder,” an acquaintance told me, his voice shrill with anxiety. People have started discussing legal arguments that reject the legitimacy of the draft on the grounds that Ukraine has not declared war.

But dissent is not welcome in public forums; those who criticize the war effort are likely to be accused of betraying their country. Some Ukrainians, and Ukraine supporters, take any criticism of the conflict to be Russian propaganda, no matter how trustworthy the source. And the stakes are getting higher. On February 8th, Ruslan Kotsaba, a Western Ukrainian journalist who posted a video criticizing the draft and the war, was detained by the Ukrainian Security Service on suspicion of treason. (The Security Service has denied that the arrest was made because of the video, but have not provided any further explanation.) In the video, Kotsaba says, “It would be better for me to spend two to five years”—the sentence for noncompliance with the draft—“in prison than to go into a civil war, to kill or help kill my countrymen in the east. . . . I reject this draft, and I call on all sensible people to reject it.” In a divided country in which every government institution has been hollowed out by corruption, and where a Ministry of Information Policy was formed to coördinate the “information war” with Russia, the air is clouded with conspiracy theories. In January, the filmmaker Oleksandr Techinskiy, who made the documentary “All Things Ablaze,” about the Maidan protests, told me, “The closer you get, the less you understand.”

Meanwhile in Washington a growing number of powerful voices are advocating for “lethal aid” to Ukraine. On February 2nd, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released a joint report, written by a group of former senior officials from the U.S. government, including Strobe Talbott, calling for the provision to Ukraine of three billion dollars in military aid, including “lethal defensive arms.”

Many Western arguments in favor of aid to Ukraine try to draw a clear division between the old Ukrainian government and the one that came to power after the revolution, a year ago. “The new Ukraine seeks to become the opposite of the old Ukraine, which was demoralized and riddled with corruption,” George Soros (for whose foundation I once worked) and Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote in the New York Times last month. “The new Ukraine, however, faces a potent challenge from the old Ukraine,” which “is solidly entrenched in a state bureaucracy that has worked hand in hand with a business oligarchy.” But what exactly do they mean by “the new Ukraine?” Do they mean its president, Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch who made his fortune in the world of post-Soviet business, in which corruption is almost mandatory? Or its Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who spent years as a successful politician in the old Ukraine?

The Maidan revolution has had little success in transforming the way in which the government conducts its business—slowly, opaquely, incompetently, and with plenty of what Levy and Soros politely refer to as “leakages.” Poroshenko, who owns one of the largest confectionary manufacturers in the country, earning him the nickname “the chocolate king,” was elected in 2014 by terrified citizens who hoped that he could use his experience and connections to stop further aggression from Russia. Last winter, as separatism gained momentum, the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who is worth an estimated $1.6 billion and has made deals under every Ukrainian Administration for the past two decades, was appointed governor of Dnipropetrovsk (on the border of the conflict-torn Donetsk region), where he funded the Dnipro Battalion, a paramilitary organization.

There is one way the new Ukraine differs dramatically from the old Ukraine, and that is in the emergence of paramilitary battalions funded by oligarchs, political parties, and private donations. These bands of half-trained volunteer warriors have done much of the fighting in the current conflict, operating largely independently of the government, and often without adequate coördination. While both the Ukrainian government and citizens often treat these volunteers as heroes, there are signs that they may pose a risk of armed revolt. This summer, members of the Azov Battalion, which has an unsettling fondness for Nazi symbols, told the Guardian that once the war in the east was over, they’d “bring the fight to Kiev,” and that they wanted to install a strong military leader. They didn’t think it would be very hard. “What are the police going to do?” one Azov fighter said. “They could not do anything against the peaceful protesters on Maidan; they are hardly going to withstand armed fighting units."