75 Percent of Ukrainians Open to Russia Negotiations Amid Current Wars in the World as India Pushes to End Ukraine War
A September 2026 poll shows 75% of Ukrainians are open to negotiations with Russia to end the war, while India steps up diplomatic efforts amid rising costs from the conflict including a drone strike on an Indian-owned factory, as foreign volunteers and North Korean troops continue to play roles on the battlefield in current wars in the world.
Ukrainian Public Opinion on Negotiations
A September poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that 75% of Ukrainians are open to holding negotiations with Russia now to end the war. [2] Pollsters stress that this does not mean support for making concessions to Russia. [2] Respondents were asked if they are open to holding negotiations with Russia now to end the war, or not, and a total of 75% said they were open to such negotiations while 21% were not and 4% were undecided. [2] The distribution of responses has remained virtually unchanged since February 2025 when 74% of Ukrainians were open to negotiations. [2] KIIS describes the results of the two polls as virtually identical. [2] The pollsters specifically emphasise that the question concerned only whether negotiations should take place, not whether Ukraine should make possible concessions to Russia. [2] KIIS Executive Director Anton Hrushetskyi said Ukrainians remain resilient while also being open to difficult compromises in order to achieve an acceptable peace. [2] He said such compromises must not turn into unilateral concessions or resemble Ukraine's capitulation. [2] Hrushetskyi added that despite the intensification of Russian terror against the civilian population and the not always sufficiently decisive and supported by real actions reaction of Western partners, Ukrainians are ready to bear the burden of war and continue until an acceptable peace is achieved. [2] The survey was conducted on 12–21 September 2026 using telephone interviews of 1,002 Ukrainian citizens aged 18 and over living in territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. [2]
India’s Growing Role in Peace Efforts
India’s recent push to become more involved in helping end the Russia-Ukraine war comes as the costs of the conflict continue to mount for New Delhi. [1] This push occurs amid the threat of US tariffs on major buyers of Russian energy and a recent drone attack on an Indian-owned pharmaceutical plant in Ukraine. [1] Sunday morning’s drone attack destroyed a large part of Kusum Group’s factory in Sumy, killing one person and injuring several others. [1] The company, which has manufactured generic medicines in Ukraine since 2009, said the attack was particularly devastating as its warehouse had already suffered a drone strike in April last year. [1] The Ukrainian embassy in India condemned the attack in a social media post. [1] The embassy wrote that the barbarians do not care that the factory belongs to Indian owners. [1] It added that the hypocrites continue talking about the historic friendship between India and Muscovy while in reality death and destruction are the true face of Russian fascism hidden behind the mask. [1]
Poll results indicate 75 percent of Ukrainians are open to negotiations with Russia to end the war. — Source: ukrainskapravda
Foreign Volunteer Forces in Ukrainian Service
Colonel Jose David Chaparro commands the Bolivar Battalion, a drone unit within the Security Service of Ukraine’s Special Operations Center Alpha. [3] The 59-year-old Venezuelan does one-arm push-ups with his team during routine infantry training in Mykolaiv Oblast. [3] Three years after its founding the Bolivar Battalion has grown to about 250 soldiers, most of them Colombian along with a few Chileans, Venezuelans, Italians, Germans and Portuguese. [3] Chaparro taps each new member on the shoulder with a katana during formal induction. [3] The battalion was integrated into the SBU in 2025. [3] A Colombian soldier with the call sign Billy who has served under Chaparro for more than a year says the first rule he heard from the colonel is to stay alive. [3] Billy transferred from another battalion where he felt he was being sent on combat missions to die. [3] Chaparro requires soldiers to train for a couple of months before signing a contract. [3] The battalion now operates a range of drones from first-person-view strike drones to fixed-wing reconnaissance drones and fights in Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. [3] Chaparro says that no soldier has been killed in action since the battalion switched to drone warfare 15 months ago. [3] Military analyst Viktor Kevliuk from the Centre for Defence Strategies estimates that between 10,000 and 16,000 foreign volunteers serve across Ukraine's armed forces with South Americans making up 40% the largest regional group. [3]
North Korean Military Involvement with Russia
Since October 2024 North Korea has sent an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 troops to Russia’s Kursk region and absorbed roughly 6,000 casualties based on the intelligence estimates of South Korea and the United Kingdom. [4] In return for the deployments North Korea has gained cash payments estimated in the billions of dollars, food and energy supplies, and technology transfers including air defense systems, older but still capable Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters, and technical assistance connected to satellite launches and naval reactor technology for submarines. [4] South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has assessed that despite considerable losses North Korea’s military has gained live experience of drone warfare, electronic warfare and modern combined-arms combat together with direct exposure to Russian battlefield tactics and equipment. [4] North Korean soldiers rotated home from the front have reportedly gone on to serve as instructors seeding lessons from Kursk through the wider Korean People’s Army. [4] Ukraine’s military intelligence chief estimated that North Korean-supplied artillery shells and missiles have accounted for roughly half of what Russian forces fire at the front. [4] Troop deployments helped Russia recover Kursk territory that Ukraine had seized in its August 2024 incursion but North Korean units have so far been confined largely to Russian soil. [4]
Venezuelan volunteer leads Ukraine's South American battalion after fleeing Maduro's regime. — Source: kyivindependent
Diplomatic and Ceasefire Initiatives
On 4 October President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready to take part in a trilateral meeting with Russia and the United States at the technical level which the Americans have proposed holding by the end of October. [2] Media reports indicate that Türkiye and the United Nations will organise new talks between Russia and Ukraine on a ceasefire in the Black Sea seeking to bring together disparate efforts to protect grain supplies amid a sharp rise in global food prices. [2] US President Donald Trump said he had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to scale back strikes on Russian oil refineries and claimed that Zelenskyy had agreed. [2] Zelenskyy previously said that during closed-door talks with Trump there had been no attempts to pressure Kyiv into unilaterally halting attacks on oil refineries and other facilities of this kind. [2] US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that achieving an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine would be difficult but Washington would try to do so. [2]
Current Wars in the World and Foreign Contributions
Chaparro was born and raised in San Cristobal Venezuela and came to Kyiv in 1989 for a postgraduate law degree. [3] He lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union before returning to Venezuela in the late 1990s. [3] From 2001 to 2005 he served as acting consul in Moscow and resigned when the gap between the government's ideology and his own democratic values widened. [3] In 2013 Chaparro joined students and other protesters who took to the streets in San Cristobal and by early 2014 the social uprising known as guarimbas had spread across Venezuela. [3] Chaparro's opposition to the regime forced him to flee to Ukraine with his family between 2013 and 2014. [3] Once in Kyiv Chaparro joined the barricades at Ukraine's EuroMaidan Revolution and says Venezuela and Ukraine share a mutual enemy in Russia. [3] When Russia's full-scale invasion started in 2022 Chaparro volunteered in the Territorial Defense Forces. [3] In 2023 he founded the Bolivar Battalion named after Simon Bolivar. [3] Lt. Col. Kostiantyn Milevskyi head of the Ground Forces department that coordinates foreigners' military service says pre-contract training for soldiers is unusual and probably specific to special operations units. [3] Chaparro says Ukrainians have welcomed him with open arms and see him as just another Ukrainian. [3] A soldier with the call sign Aries recalls a racist remark a senior Ukrainian officer made to Chaparro telling him to get out of the house and take your Indians with you. [3] Aries says Chaparro defended his soldiers and nearly got into trouble himself. [3] Kevliuk says foreign volunteers have proven especially valuable amid Ukraine's mobilization problems and an estimated 200,000 absent-without-leave cases as of early 2026 which he attributes partly to combat exhaustion and resistance to conscription among Ukrainians who did not volunteer. [3] While foreign fighters help partially alleviate manpower shortages they do not offer a systemic solution to Ukraine's broader personnel crisis. [3] In their first months of deployment North Korean units suffered catastrophic losses with some estimates indicating 40 percent of the initial 11,000-strong contingent was killed or too badly wounded to fight within three months. [4] U.S. officials described North Korean assaults on entrenched Ukrainian positions as human wave tactics that were largely ineffective. [4] Researchers at RAND have cautioned that dismissing North Korean troops as unsophisticated fanatics risks recycling old stereotypes about Asian communist militaries. [4] Many of the deployed units come from North Korea’s elite special operations Storm Corps and proved highly motivated resilient under fire and increasingly adept at countering the first-person-view drones that have come to define this war. [4] Ukrainian intelligence has also reported the arrival of dedicated North Korean drone units and reconnaissance specialists. [4]
What to watch next: Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready to take part in a trilateral meeting with Russia and the United States at the technical level by the end of October while Türkiye and the United Nations will organise new talks on a Black Sea ceasefire for grain exports and Washington will try to negotiate an energy ceasefire.
