Month: February 2024

The December day in 2021 that set off a revolution across the videogame industry appeared to start innocuously enough. Managers at a Wisconsin studio called Raven began meeting one by one with quality assurance testers, who vet video games for bugs, to announce that the company was overhauling their department. Going forward, managers said, the lucky testers would be permanent employees, not temps. They would earn an extra $1.50 an hour.

It was only later in the morning, a Friday, that the catch became apparent: One-third of the studio’s roughly 35 testers were being let go as part of the overhaul. The workers were stunned. Raven was owned by Activision Blizzard, one of the industry’s largest companies, and there appeared to be plenty of work to go around. Several testers had just worked late into the night to meet a looming deadline.

“My friend called me crying, saying, ‘I just lost my job,’” recalled Erin Hall, one of the testers who stayed on. “None of us saw that coming.”

The testers conferred with one another over the weekend and announced a strike on Monday. Just after they returned to work seven weeks later, they filed paperwork to hold a union election. Raven never rehired the laid-off workers, but the other testers won their election in May 2022, forming the first union at a major U.S. video game company.

It was at this point that the rebellion took a truly unusual turn. Large American companies typically challenge union campaigns, as Activision had at Raven. But in this case, Activision’s days as the sole decision maker were numbered. In January 2022, Microsoft had announced a nearly $70 billion deal to purchase the video game maker, and the would-be owners seemed to take a more permissive view of labor organizing.

The month after the union election, Microsoft announced that it would stay neutral if any of Activision’s roughly 7,000 eligible employees sought to unionize with the Communications Workers of America — meaning the company would not try to stop the organizing, unlike most employers. Microsoft later said that it would extend the deal to studios it already owned.

Q.A. testers can work grueling hours for low pay, and testers at other studios were already considering a union. Two more groups of testers — one at Activision and one at a Microsoft subsidiary called ZeniMax — voted to unionize after the company’s neutrality announcements.

Now that Activision is part of Microsoft — it closed the purchase in October — testers at several parts of the combined company are seeking to unionize as well, according to union officials. These officials say that the company has bargained in good faith and that the two sides have made considerable progress toward a first contract. Within a few years, Microsoft could have over 1,000 union employees working under collective bargaining agreements, making it an outlier in big tech.

On one level, it seemed obvious why Microsoft, once a poster child for corporate ruthlessness, would go this route: The company wanted regulators to bless its deal with Activision. Given the Biden administration’s close ties with labor, it didn’t take a Kissingerian flair for strategy to see that a truce with unions might help. Cynics were quick to point out that the company laid off nearly 10 percent of its video game workers, most of them from Activision, once the deal was in hand.

Still, many large tech companies have business before the federal government — and almost all have taken steps to discourage unionization. That includes Amazon, Apple and Google, which are in the sights of antitrust regulators.

Like Microsoft, these companies routinely position themselves as progressive employers, pointing to corporate diversity initiatives and support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Some channeled their employees’ anxiety over Trump-era policies on travel and immigration. Yet only Microsoft, whose leaders say they have been on a “journey” rooted in the principle that “people have a fundamental right to organize,” has taken a permissive path on unions.

And for some employees, that’s a key distinction. Workers who have sought to unionize at Amazon, Apple and Google don’t seem persuaded of their employers’ benevolence, pointing to evidence of retaliation. (The companies have denied these accusations and say they respect workers’ right to organize.) The workers note that Amazon and Google have hired consulting firms that specialize in fighting unions.

By contrast, employees who have sought to unionize at Microsoft consider neutrality “an absolute gift,” said Autumn Mitchell, a quality assurance worker who was part of the organizing campaign.

All of which raises a question: In an age where companies routinely proclaim their commitments to civil rights and the environment, what does it even mean to be a woke employer? And can Microsoft, on many days the most valuable company in the world thanks to its success in artificial intelligence, and with a history of squeezing competitors, truly claim to be more evolved than most?

Remaking a Corporate Image

It’s not hard to understand why Microsoft executives in the 1990s sometimes came off as villains. In a case that went to trial in 1998, the Justice Department said Microsoft had illegally schemed to crush Netscape after the smaller company rejected its offer to divvy up the browser market. Witnesses said Microsoft executives tossed around phrases like “cut off their air supply” and “knife the baby” when discussing competitors. (Microsoft denied at the time that it had acted illegally; some executives denied using such phrases.)

Microsoft successfully appealed a judge’s decision to break up the company, but the ordeal still proved costly. It prompted comparisons with the great monopolies of yore, like Standard Oil, and cast a shadow over future deals, like the company’s abortive attempt in 2008 to buy Yahoo. A court monitored the company for nearly a decade.

It was during the antitrust litigation that a Microsoft lawyer named Brad Smith auditioned for the job of general counsel on the basis of a simple philosophy: “Make peace,” he urged his higher-ups.

Mr. Smith got the job, and Microsoft began to cultivate better relationships with government overseers. Even when Microsoft believed regulators were overstepping their authority, Mr. Smith later recalled in a speech on the legacy of the case, the company would often say “let’s figure out what it makes sense to do nonetheless.”

Underlying the approach was Mr. Smith’s feel for the shifting ideological tides — and his sense that shifting with them would serve the company best. One colleague recalled a 2021 presentation to the company’s top executives in which Mr. Smith predicted that the coming wave of tech regulation would be like the wave of New Deal-era financial regulations, and that “the next five years of regulation will define next the 50 years.” Mr. Smith said the company should help shape the new rules and adapt to them rather than resist them.

The break with Microsoft’s scorched-earth past was halting at first.In 2012, the company hired the political strategist Mark Penn, who produced a negative ad campaign targeting Google’s search engine.

But when a new chief executive, Satya Nadella, took over in 2014, he seemed determined to help complete the reinvention. He dispatched Mr. Smith to negotiate a peace agreement with Google. He hired a mindfulness guru used by the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks to work with top executives.

Not that Mr. Nadella and Mr. Smith, who had been promoted to president, were averse to competition. They simply went about it differently. Instead of directly undermining fellow tech companies, they drew contrasts between Microsoft’s new high-road practices and rivals’ questionable behavior — for example, by proposing regulations on facial recognition software. Unlike Microsoft, companies like Google and Apple had declined to make their facial recognition versions available for government testing. (Google said the comparison isn’t apt because it does not offer general facial recognition software.)

In 2015, Microsoft, a pioneer among tech companies in hiring temporary workers and contractors to work for less pay and job security than long-term employees, became one of the first tech giants to require large contractors to provide paid time off for workers assigned to its projects.

Amazon appeared to be a particular foil. Mr. Smith noted in his 2019 book “Tools and Weapons” that Amazon had fought a proposed Seattle tax to fund affordable housing the year before, going so far as to stop planning for a building until the tax was lowered. Shortly after, Microsoft made a financial pledge, which eventually reached $750 million, to expand such housing.

(Amazon declined to comment other than to say it had invested more than $600 million in affordable housing to date.)

The next year, Microsoft proposed a state tax to subsidize higher education that would require it and Amazon to pay a higher rate than other businesses. “Let’s ask the largest companies in the tech sector, which are the largest employers of high-skilled talent, to do a bit more,” Mr. Smith wrote in an opinion essay. Amazon quibbled with the tax before backing a compromise.

Liberal policymakers noted the contrast between the two companies. “The level of engagement is totally different,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington State Democrat who is the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “It’s like night and day from Amazon.”

In a way, Mr. Smith and Microsoft had turned the mantra of enlightened self-interest on its head. Increasingly, the company appeared to practice a kind of self-interested enlightenment, taking positions that appeared calculated to highlight the ways it had reformed itself and to deflect scrutiny toward competitors.

The makeover was so successful that the House antitrust subcommittee invited Mr. Smith to brief members in 2020 as they prepared for a hearing involving the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, which the panel was investigating for possible anticompetitive behavior.

Yet 18 months later, the company’s adult-in-the-room image was suddenly under assault. Shortly after Microsoft announced its plans to purchase Activision, a coalition of liberal groups told the Federal Trade Commission that the deal could “lead to an undue concentration of market power,” effectively reviving the 25-year-old critique of Microsoft as a monopolist. Among the groups in the coalition was a prominent union: the Communications Workers of America.

If someone were to design a tech job with the goal of maximizing interest in a union, there’s a good chance it would look like “quality assurance tester.” To an outsider, the tester’s job can sound dreamy — being paid to play video games before they’re publicly available. Within the industry, the work is regarded as a physical and mental slog. Testers frequently play sections of games over and over for hours in search of subtle glitches.

At times they must do this during punishing stretches known as “crunch,” when a game release is imminent and the work lasts 10 or 12 hours most days, often six days a week.

“One of the things getting us bad is finding out that overtime is happening at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon,” said Wayne Dayberry, a tester at a Microsoft-owned studio in Maryland.

“It’s like, dude, we need time, you can’t just do that. People have kids.”

And the work comes with some of the lowest pay in the industry. After their raise in late 2021, many testers at Activision still made under $19 an hour. Testers typically remain for years in the position with little prospect of promotion to other jobs, even with a college degree.

These frustrations had already provoked a union campaign at Activision when Microsoft announced its acquisition. C.W.A. officials worried that the tech giant, which had no unionized U.S. employees, would promptly squelch it, and that wages and employment could fall with fewer companies competing for workers.

But the opposition of the politically powerful union was not absolute. During a conversation in early 2022, two top union officials told Portia Wu, a Microsoft policy executive who is now Maryland’s labor secretary, that a neutrality agreement at Activision would help reassure them. Ms. Wu, who had worked with unions as an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, agreed to float the idea at Microsoft.

She told colleagues that employees tend to win once they get to a union election, which some Activision employees were seeking, and that a contentious election process can damage morale. By reaching a deal with the communications workers’ union, she added, Microsoft could retain more control over the narrative as well as the timing of union elections, which often surprise employers.

Mr. Smith and other executives appeared receptive. “Every time we’ve talked about this, we’ve all come to the same point of view that this is the right path for Microsoft,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “That we have way more that we can potentially gain than put at risk.”

Chris Shelton, the union’s president at the time, and Mr. Smith announced in June 2022 that Microsoft would stay neutral in union campaigns at Activision if the acquisition was finalized. Not long after, the union informed Microsoft that a group of Q.A. testers had also been organizing at ZeniMax Media, a video game company Microsoft already owned, with studios in Maryland and Texas. The company agreed to grant workers at ZeniMax the same neutrality deal it had negotiated for Activision.

Mr. Dayberry, a leader of the union campaign at ZeniMax, said the company was good to its word: Managers never so much as mentioned the union, much less sought to discourage support for it. After years in which workers had clashed with managers over issues like pay, promotions and scheduling, he said, “It was weird, but good weird.” The workers officially unionized in January 2023.

A few months earlier, Mr. Shelton had met with the F.T.C. chair, Lina Khan, and urged her to accept the Activision deal in light of the neutrality agreements. But Ms. Khan, who has helped make labor considerations a key criterion for analyzing mergers, was unimpressed.

“Time and time again, antitrust regulators have heard promises made by companies leading up to a merger, on everything from labor to lowering prices, that have been reneged immediately after the merger closes,” said Douglas Farrar, an F.T.C. spokesman.

The Activision deal finally closed in October, after a federal judge denied the F.T.C.’s request to block it temporarily. Analysts say the investment is important for expanding Microsoft’s presence in mobile gaming and could prove highly lucrative if the company can incorporate new A.I. capabilities into its games.

In the meantime, the opposition of the agency — which has appealed the ruling and said the recent layoffs contradict Microsoft’s earlier assurances — has continued. (Microsoft said many of the layoffs had been planned by Activision.)

The company’s courtship of labor has continued as well. In December, Microsoft announced that it would effectively extend the neutrality agreement to any group of employees seeking to join an affiliate of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the labor federation that encompasses C.W.A. and nearly 60 other unions. Roughly 100,000 people will be eligible to unionize without opposition from their employer under the company’s new framework.

Liz Shuler, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, said Microsoft had gone further in collaborating with organized labor than almost any other major company. She said she first met Mr. Smith to discuss labor issues almost two years ago, at which point he told her, “If workers want a union, why shouldn’t they be able to form one?” Then he added: “This is the prevailing winds of change in the country. I think Microsoft should be adapting to it instead of resisting it.”

A Kind of Corporate Paternalism

Is there such a thing as a woke corporation? Conservatives say the answer is emphatically yes. In their telling, corporate executives have been foisting left-wing values on the country for decades and redoubled their efforts around the time of Donald J. Trump’s election, taking liberal positions on transgender rights, voting rights and gun control. They note that scores of companies announced diversity initiatives during the protests that followed George Floyd’s death.

But skeptics question whether these corporate initiatives are examples of progressive convictions in action, or simply investments in placating liberals and warding off calls for regulation, higher taxes and higher pay. Certainly, the gestures aren’t breaking the bank: In 2020, Chipotle pledged $1 million to civil rights organizations. By contrast, a 10 percent increase in employee compensation would have cost the company tens of millions of dollars. (The company ended a 10 percent hourly pay increase about three months into the pandemic.)

Even companies often cited for their generosity to employees have generally spurned organized labor. Whole Foods and other progressive-minded companies, like Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, have at times offered retail workers above-market wages or benefits. Whole Foods has built an entire philosophy out of its crunchy righteousness, or what its co-founder calls “conscious capitalism.”

But Whole Foods fought unionization in the early 2000s, while Starbucks has been accused by the National Labor Relations Board of violating employees’ labor rights hundreds of times since its workers began unionizing in 2021. (Starbucks denies the accusations; Whole Foods has said it does not believe a union is in employees’ interests.)

When it comes to their employees, said Matthew Bodie, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, these companies favor a kind of corporate paternalism. “We want to be beneficent, but we want to do it on our terms,” he said, channeling executives.

Even tech companies famous for pampering employees have almost entirely resisted unionization. After employees began to organize in 2018, partly over concerns about the company’s contracts with federal security agencies, Google hired a consulting firm that specializes in stifling unions. The company fired at least four employees involved in protesting the contracts. (Google said the firings had nothing to do with protest activity.)

When I asked Mr. Smith why Microsoft was willing to embrace neutrality when its competitors were not, he told me that “the tech sector has often been built by founders, and founders have often been very focused on retaining a level of control over their enterprises.” By contrast, he said, “I think the fact that Microsoft is a little bit older, sometimes a little bit wiser, at least gives us an opportunity to think more broadly.”

White-Collar Collective Action

Activision may have been the immediate impetus for Microsoft’s labor stance, but the neutrality deal could benefit the company far beyond the acquisition. It may be a relatively cost-effective way to cast the company as pro-worker at a time when millions are worried about losing their jobs to generative A.I., whose release has helped supercharge Microsoft’s share price. Noting that unions are not a topic raised by analysts on the company’s earnings calls, Gil Luria, who follows Microsoft for the investment bank D.A. Davidson, said, “I don’t expect this to be a material issue.”

The move could also hamstring two of the company’s competitors, Amazon and Apple, where unions have gained traction in recent years.

If these companies don’t follow Microsoft’s lead on neutrality, it could add to the public relations challenges they face in opposing unionization. It could also give Microsoft an advantage in the highly competitive market for engineers, some of whom have made clear that political and social issues affect their choice of employer.

If, on the other hand, those companies relent on neutrality, a much larger portion of their work force could end up unionizing than at Microsoft. Amazon employs hundreds of thousands of workers in warehouses across the country, while Apple employs tens of thousands of workers at retail stores.

By contrast, a large majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are white-collar and highly paid. “There’s not a threat of unionization at that level,” said Joshua Winter, a former Microsoft Philanthropies official focused on bringing economic opportunity to historically underrepresented communities. “They’re taking care of those people.”

Yet if Microsoft assumed the union effort would end with video game workers, it may have miscalculated. Over the past few years, highly paid white-collar workers have begun to assert themselves far beyond Google, engaging in forms of collective action that resemble union organizing. Corporate employees have protested what they see as overly strict return-to-office policies at companies like Apple and Starbucks, and over a variety of social issues, like their employers’ carbon footprint (Amazon) or lack of diversity (Nike).

Even at Microsoft, well-compensated employees have organized protests over political concerns. In 2018, more than 100 employees urged Mr. Nadella, the chief executive, to cancel a nearly $20 million contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency over its role in separating migrant children from their parents.

Mr. Nadella responded with an email calling the family separation policy “cruel and abusive” and emphasizing that the Trump administration was not relying on Microsoft technology to enact it. But the internal campaign continued the next year, when hundreds of workers at GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary, signed a letter demanding an end to a separate contract with the agency. The pressure fizzled out after several of the employees involved left the company.

The outcome might have been different if they had the option of unionizing without resistance.

Fred Jennings, a former GitHub employee, said he and his colleagues discussed forming a union. “Quite a few people were saying, ‘Look, our best lever to get this to change is to also push for a union,’” he said, adding that, in the end, too many worried about retaliation to make it a viable option.

When I asked Mr. Jennings if neutrality would likely have changed his colleagues’ appetite for unionizing, he was unequivocal: “With all the advantages of hindsight,” he said, “absolutely.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

The reality has been clear for weeks, since former President Donald J. Trump trounced his opponents across the frozen fields and icy highways of Iowa. But his overwhelming victory on Saturday in South Carolina, where he defeated Nikki Haley in her home state, makes it all but official.

The Republican nominating contest isn’t a competition. It’s a coronation.

The party primaries this winter represented the best chance for Republicans who were opposed to the former president to oust him from his dominant position in the G.O.P. The stakes were extraordinarily high: Many of his Republican opponents see Mr. Trump as, at best, unelectable and, at worst, a threat to the foundations of American democracy.

And yet, as the campaign has moved through the first nominating contests, the race has not revealed Mr. Trump’s weaknesses, but instead the enduring nature of his ironclad grip on the Republican Party. From the backrooms of Capitol Hill to the town hall meetings of New Hampshire to the courtrooms of New York City, Mr. Trump shows no sign of being shaken from his controlling position in the party — not in 2024, and not in the foreseeable future.

“I think the party will be done with Trump when Trump is done with the party,” said David Kochel, a longtime Republican strategist who is opposed to Mr. Trump. “That’s the long and short of it.”

All of Mr. Trump’s primary rivals, except Ms. Haley, have folded and endorsed his candidacy. He has conquered state parties and the Republican National Committee, installing loyalists in key posts, and collected the backing of vast numbers of Republican elected officials. And what once appeared to be extraordinary political liabilities — the 91 felony counts against him, his increasingly extreme rhetoric, his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — have only served to bolster his support among the Republican faithful.

With his victory on Saturday, Mr. Trump has swept all the early nominating contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the U.S. Virgin Islands, South Carolina — an unprecedented achievement in a contested primary race. He heads into Super Tuesday on March 5, when a third of all delegates to the G.O.P. convention will be awarded, with “maximum velocity,” said the Republican governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, who endorsed Mr. Trump over his predecessor, Ms. Haley.

Ms. Haley has vowed to remain in the race, scheduling events in the coming days in Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah. On Saturday night, she argued that broad swaths of the Republican primary electorate still wanted an alternative to Mr. Trump.

“They have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate,” she told supporters at her election night party. “And I have a duty to give them that choice.”

Ms. Haley has a point: In Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Trump won with about half of the vote, indicating that his support may have a ceiling even within his own party. In exit polls and surveys, Haley backers expressed negative views about Mr. Trump, indicating that a faction of the Republican coalition has concerns about the former president.

But those Trump skeptics are not a majority of the party. Nor have they been enough for Ms. Haley to win a primary race, leaving her running a campaign that many Republican strategists and officials believe is headed toward inevitable defeat.

“This is the fastest primary process since I can remember,” said Ron Kaufman, a Republican presidential strategist who has been involved in primary campaigns since Ronald Reagan ran in 1976. “There isn’t anyone who doesn’t perceive Trump being the nominee, including Nikki Haley. Whether you like it or don’t like it, everyone understands he is the perceived nominee.”

Barring a spring surprise — a debilitating health issue, a legal event — Mr. Trump appears to be on a rapid march to the Republican nomination. It’s a reality that shows how Mr. Trump has driven his party — and the nation — into a new era where once-unthinkable policies and rhetoric have become standard. Mr. Trump has floated breaking from NATO, conducting mass deportations and prosecuting his political enemies.

But between his promises to not be a dictator “other than Day 1” and to dismantle core elements of American governance, democracy and the rule of law, Republicans not only have stood by the former president but have rewarded him with electoral victories.

“The power of Trump in the Republican Party is extraordinary — he causes people to defy common sense,” said Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat. “It’s stunning.”

Republican opponents of Mr. Trump insisted he could be defeated if the race narrowed to a one-on-one contest. The mistake of 2016, they argued, was that his rivals remained in the race too long, allowing him to win with a plurality by splitting the votes against him.

This year, several of Mr. Trump’s rivals folded before voting began. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, once seen as his strongest opposition, ended his campaign humiliated.

That left Ms. Haley as Mr. Trump’s only competition and created the man-versus-woman contest his opponents had long hoped to see. In the final days of the South Carolina race, she escalated her attacks on the former president — following what Trump opponents, including former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, had believed was the strategy that could defeat him.

Yet, she failed to win in New Hampshire, perhaps the most favorable terrain in her bid, given the large presence of independent voters and moderate Republicans who participate in the party primary. In the Nevada primary, where Mr. Trump didn’t compete, she was defeated by “none of these candidates.”

Her loss in South Carolina was particularly damaging, as it came from voters who knew her better than perhaps anywhere else in the country. Her home state rejected her by a double-digit margin. She appeared to win only a handful of counties in the state, all home to larger numbers of moderate white college-educated independents.

Mr. Trump’s dominance is not limited to the campaign trail. On Saturday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a straw poll of Mr. Trump’s potential vice-presidential picks overshadowed the one about the presidential nomination — a survey Mr. Trump won with 94 percent.

On Capitol Hill, earlier this month, Mr. Trump opposed long-awaited border legislation, and Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, changed course and tanked the bill.

And even Mr. Trump’s most inflammatory statements no longer draw even the mild rebukes from within his party that they once did during his presidency. Many of those critics have resigned, retired or been driven to political defeats with help from Mr. Trump.

When the former president compared his criminal indictments to the situation of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in prison, Republicans offered no response.

When Mr. Trump suggested he had threatened to encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that failed to meet its financial commitments, European leaders reacted with alarm and public rebukes. Republicans shrugged.

Nor did they reject Mr. Trump’s comments at CPAC on Saturday attacking his political adversaries in strident terms and casting himself — a former president and the figurehead of his party — as a “political dissident.”

“I stand before you today, not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident,” he said. “I am a dissident.”

Some who have opposed Mr. Trump have spent recent days trying to find reasons for his seeming invincibility.

On a private call leaked to reporters, Mr. DeSantis suggested to supporters of his campaign that conservative media outlets were responsible for Mr. Trump’s support, saying they provided “no accountability” of the former president.

“He said at some point he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to Mr. Trump. “Well, I think he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and the conservative media wouldn’t even report on it.”

Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a moderate Republican who is backing Ms. Haley, said Mr. Trump was sweeping the primaries because of the media coverage of his legal peril and court appearances.

“I said that to the folks at CNN and Fox, you guys keep propping this guy up,” Mr. Sununu said. “You keep highlighting the fact that he’s in court, you keep allowing him to be a victim, and he’s only winning because of the victimization of himself and he loves it. He knows how to play that very, very well.”

The reality may be far more fundamental than media coverage. Despite the political risk, a majority of Republican voters like Mr. Trump. And in this primary contest, that very well could be just enough.

When Russian missiles struck the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv a couple of weeks ago, schoolchildren and their teachers installed in newly built underground classrooms did not hear a thing.

Down in the bowels of Kharkiv’s cavernous, Soviet-era subway stations, the city administration has built a line of brightly decorated classrooms, where 6- and 7-year-olds are attending primary school for the first time in their lives in this war-stricken city.

“The children were fine,” said Lyudmyla Demchenko, 47, one of the teachers. “You cannot hear the sirens down here.”

Ten years after the conflict with Russian-backed separatists broke out and two years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainians are weary but ever determined to repel the invaders. The war has touched every family — with thousands of civilians dead, close to 200,000 soldiers killed and wounded, and nearly 10 million refugees and displaced in a country of nearly 45 million people. Yet, despite the death, destruction and deprivations, a majority of Ukrainians remain optimistic about the future, and even describe themselves as happy, according to independent polls.

Kharkiv is a good example. It lies only 25 miles from the border with Russia and has suffered a heavy share of Russian artillery, drone and missile attacks. Most families fled at the beginning of the war or lived for months underground in the subway, as Russian troops came close to seizing the city. But the Ukrainian defenses held, families returned and the city came back to life.

In December, when Russian missile attacks escalated again, most people stayed put. Kyryl Rohachov, 22, even opened a cocktail bar on one of Kharkiv’s main avenues with a childhood friend who now manages the business.

Days before the opening in January, missile strikes shattered buildings and windows along the street. “It’s not the best time,” Mr. Rohachov admitted in a video call from Switzerland, where he works in a restaurant and cares for his orphaned brother and his own family. “But I want to bring something new to my lovely Kharkiv.”

In a recent opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the overwhelming majority of respondents, nearly 90 percent, said they still believed in Ukraine’s victory, as long as Western aid continued.

More than 60 percent of respondents considered themselves happy, even while the majority said they had lost income and suffered from physical and mental health problems. A similar number said they had lost at least one relative or friend, said Anton Hrushetsky, the director of the institute.

People seriously pared back their lives and expectations, he said, adding, “That is keeping these happiness level higher.”

Nevertheless, there are signs of a small but growing pessimism, he said. In December, 19 percent of respondents said they were ready to make concessions to Russia to bring an end to the war, an increase from 10 percent in May.

That pessimism was directly tied to waning Western support for Ukraine, Mr. Hrushetsky said.

“When they see this insufficient support and these political problems in the United States, in the Western European states, they are becoming more depressed and more pessimistic,” he said.

It is already being felt in the army ranks, where commanders complain of a shortage of ammunition and a lack of manpower as fewer men are enlisting. Soldiers say they have noticed that when they enter a cafe or restaurant in uniform, people turn away or clear the room, scared that the soldiers might be recruitment officers serving draft papers.

The pain and loss felt by everyone is evident at the constant funerals around the country and in the expanding military graveyards. A crowd of 300 turned out on a recent day in the town of Kamianske to say farewell to a fallen soldier. Everyone, old and young, knelt on the frozen ground as his coffin passed on its way to the cemetery.

The suffering caused by Russia’s invasion has hardened attitudes in Kharkiv. Part of the province lived under a brutal seven-month occupation in 2022, and the bombardment continues. This month, two families, three children among them, were burned alive in their homes when missiles struck a fuel depot, setting an adjoining line of houses ablaze.

“Each missile they shoot at us just fuels our fury,” said the chief police investigator for Kharkiv province., Serhii Bolvinov, who has opened thousands of criminal cases against Russia for rape, torture and arbitrary killings, as well as deaths and loss of property from bombardment.

“Each of us has hate for Russians at a maximum level,” he said. “And it’s hard to understand when it will start declining. Because for now, it’s only growing.”

Anatolii Kozyr, 72, played a video on his cellphone of his farm and home, 80 miles east of Kharkiv, that were destroyed by Russian strikes a month ago.

“All my life I was gathering and organizing, and in one moment everything was gone,” he said. He lost 3,000 tons of grain, 1,000 pigs, a workshop and farm machinery, he said. “Nothing was left.”

The Russians now stand less than two miles from his village, and he sees little hope of being able to return. “They are advancing,” he said.

Dr. Maryna Prokopenko, 28, a surgeon at Kharkiv Regional Hospital, calms her nerves by working and, in her spare time, boxing to vent her anger.

She fled to Poland at the beginning of the war but, missing home, returned to Kharkiv after a month. An ear, nose and throat specialist, she spends most of her time patching up wounded civilians.

“We try to work a lot because it really is a distraction,” she said. “I have work, and I am calm and strong.”

Like many Ukrainians, she yearns for the war to stop. “When I see all these wounds and destroyed bodies, and so many physical disabilities, it is awful,” she said. “I want this war to end.”

But when asked about giving up territory in a peace treaty, or ceding Kharkiv to Russian control, she rejected the prospect outright.

Two neighbors in their 80s, Raisa and Svitlana, strolling through the snow in Kharkiv, were among the pessimists.

They criticized the leaders who brought war upon them. “I hope they lose their ambition and negotiate,” Svitlana said, adding that Mr. Zelensky would have to cede ground. “He cannot win.” The women gave only their first names to avoid recriminations.

Pro-democracy changes introduced several years ago that brought more accountability to local government have helped to bolster Ukraine’s resilience, some analysts have said. Ukraine also has plenty of natural leaders in addition to its military commanders and politicians.

One of Kharkiv’s most beloved characters is Serhii Zhadan, a 50-year-old punk rocker, poet, novelist and lyricist who tours the country entertaining fans and supporting soldiers on the front lines. He played a raucous set in Kharkiv last Sunday, paying tribute at one point to a group of leather-clad bikers who have been fixing and delivering motorbikes for the troops.

Mr. Zhadan has written searing verse over the 10 years of war, including a poignant poem on the loss of a childhood friend from his home province of Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. And he has immortalized in song Kharkiv’s children, who lived for weeks in the subway at the beginning of the war.

Angry and cheerful kids of Kharkiv basements
Kids living in the depths of the subway.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine, and Denys Tsyba from Kharkiv.

When Yulia Seleznyova walks around her home city in Russia, she scrutinizes everyone passing by in the hope that she will lock eyes with her son Aleksei.

She last heard from him on New Year’s Eve 2022, when he sent holiday greetings from the school in eastern Ukraine that his unit of recently mobilized soldiers was using as a headquarters

The Ukrainian military hit the school with U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets on New Year’s Day. Russian authorities acknowledged dozens of deaths, though pro-Russian military bloggers and Ukrainian authorities estimated that the real number was in the hundreds.

Aleksei was not recognized in the official death toll because not a single fragment of his body was identified in the rubble after the strike. Ms. Seleznyova was left with nothing to bury, and, she says, no closure. But it has also left a small shred of hope for a miracle.

“I still go around town sometimes, with my eyes wide open, thinking maybe he’s sitting somewhere, but he doesn’t remember us, but maybe we’re there in his subconscious mind,” Ms. Seleznyova said in an interview late last year in her one-room apartment in Tolyatti, an industrial city on the Volga River that is home to Russia’s largest car manufacturer.

“Sometimes I think maybe he lost his memory and even got married somewhere in Ukraine, but he doesn’t remember us,” she said. “That he’s just shellshocked.”

Ms. Seleznyova, 45, spent the better part of 2023 searching for answers. She traveled for days by train to the western city of Rostov, searching the morgue there for any fragment of what was once her son’s body, and waiting for the DNA she provided the authorities in January 2023 to find its match.

“January, February, March — I was in a fog for three months,” she said. “I was so depressed. You don’t need anything, you don’t want anything. Life just stopped.”

Nearly 14 months after his death, she is still mourning for her son, whom she calls by his nickname, Lyosha. She works four days a week in a factory doing a job that requires a lot of physical force. It distracts her.

But during the three days she is off, she said: “Sometimes I just cry. Sadness rolls over me. And I still think to myself that maybe it is not true.”

Aleksei was 28 when he was killed, leaving behind a wife and infant son. He was mobilized in the first days after President Vladimir V. Putin announced a “partial mobilization” in September 2022, his mother and his sister Olesya said.

He was taken from the factory where he worked straight to the draft office, she said, and then to a training ground, where his family brought him the clothing and supplies he would need for his deployment.

He had been a star soccer player on a local team and planted trees for community service. He had completed his mandatory military service, but had “never held an automatic rifle in his hand,” his mother said. Though he had no medical training, he was placed in a unit responsible for extracting injured soldiers from the battlefield and providing them with urgent care, she said.

When he was mobilized, Aleksei’s wife was pregnant with their first child. When their son Artyom was born in December, Aleksei got three days of leave to meet him before he was deployed to Makiivka, in Russian-occupied Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

A war that until that point had not particularly concerned Ms. Seleznyova and her family had suddenly entered their lives.

“I could not even imagine that something like this would happen and what’s more, that it would affect our family,” said Olesya, 21. “In fact, it never even occurred to me.”

Her mother, who said she had not paid much attention to politics before the war, agreed.

“I never thought in my life that I would bury my children,” she said. “We didn’t believe it could happen to us until it did.”

Mother and daughter said that they see that same willful ignorance in others now, “as if nothing is happening.”

“This has already become normal for people,” Ms. Seleznyova said of the war and loss. “I go around the city and observe people: they are having fun, going out, relaxing, living a normal life, no one thinks about what’s going on there.”

Both mother and daughter shared reports of soldiers who returned to Tolyatti with serious injuries only to be sent back to the front without enough time to recover.

She prays for the war to end. Her willingness to speak openly about the fighting is unusual in contemporary Russia, where a climate of stifling repression has criminalized protesting the war or criticizing it in public. Hundreds of political prisoners are serving sentences for “discrediting the Russian armed forces” or spreading “false information” about the military.

The cemetery on the outskirts of Tolyatti has rows and rows of graves of fallen soldiers. There are at least a handful whose dates of death are that same New Year’s Day.

“I met a friend recently,” Ms. Seleznyova said. “He works at the cemetery making tombstones, building fences. And I met him the other day, he expressed his condolences. And he told us, there are two to three people every day.”

The Russian authorities have not released official statistics about the war dead since September 2022. But the Pentagon estimates that about 60,000 Russian soldiers have died and that about 240,000 have been wounded.

Aleksei does not have a grave yet. Ms. Seleznyova spent almost 11 months trying to get her son’s death recognized. After months joining forces with two other mothers searching for fragments of their sons’ bodies, without success, she had to go to court to force the state to pronounce her son dead, calling witnesses who put him in the school in Makiivka at the time of the strike.

Nearly 14 months since his death, he has still not had a funeral. In a text message on Friday, Ms. Seleznyova said she had not yet received the official document certifying his military service, meaning she and Aleksei’s widow are not yet eligible for the one-time payments the state gives to the families of fallen soldiers.

The payments can be as high as the equivalent of $84,000 in some regions, more than nine times the average annual Russian salary.

“There are, of course those who care about the money,” she said, noting that one reason there is not more public criticism of the war is because “they have shut the women up with these payments.”

“Everyone’s values are different,” she continued. “And our authorities understand that people will go because everything we have is in loans, mortgages, and debts, which are not insignificant.”

Ms. Seleznyova said that the prospect of money did nothing to ease her pain. And attempts to convince her that her son’s death was not in vain do not console her.

“Some people tell me, Yulia, keep it together. Life goes on. You have children, grandchildren. And your son is a hero,” she said. “I’m not interested in him being a hero. I need him sitting here on my couch, eating my borscht and pelmeni (dumplings) and kissing and hugging me like he used to.”

She still sometimes allows herself to daydream about it.

“There’s a knock on the door, and I’ll open it, he’ll be standing in front me,” she said. “Who cares in what condition. Let it be without arms, without legs, it doesn’t matter. I need him sitting here.”