Kiev no longer resembles the city at war it did three years ago. Shops are open and people are stuck in traffic jams on their way to work. In the days since February 12 this year, when US President Donald Trump called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin - a 90-minute conversation that reflected the White House's political support for the Kremlin - the old nightmares from 2022 that Ukraine could disappear as a country have returned. Ukrainians were angry that former US President Joe Biden had withheld arms deliveries and restricted how Ukraine could use the weapons that had arrived. Yet they knew he was on their side.
Instead, Donald Trump has offered a series of exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies about the war that reflect the views of Russian President Vladimir Putin. These include dismissing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator who does not deserve a seat at the negotiating table when America and Russia decide the future of his country. The biggest lie Trump has told is that Ukraine started the war.
Trump’s negotiating strategy is to offer concessions before serious talks have even begun. Rather than pressuring a country that violated international law by invading its neighbor, causing massive destruction and hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, he has turned against Ukraine.
His public statements have offered Russia important concessions, stating that Ukraine will not join NATO and assuming that Moscow will retain at least some of the territory it has seized by force. Experience shows that Vladimir Putin respects strength. He considers concessions a sign of weakness.
Putin is not backing down from his demand to receive even more Ukrainian land than that currently occupied by his troops. Immediately after the first talks between Russia and the United States since the 2022 invasion, held in Saudi Arabia, Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated his demand that NATO troops not be deployed in Ukraine to provide security guarantees to Kiev.
A veteran European diplomat who has worked with both the Russians and the Americans told me that when the experienced Lavrov met with Trump’s rookie Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, “he would eat him like an undercooked egg.”
Challenging Times
A few days ago, as Trump was increasingly hurling insults at the Ukrainian president, I went to the heavily guarded government district in Kiev to meet with Igor Brusylov, who is a senior adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky and his deputy chief of staff. Brusilo acknowledged the pressure Trump is putting on them.
"This is very, very difficult. These are very difficult and challenging times," Brusilo said, adding: "I wouldn't say it's easier now than it was in 2022. It's like you're reliving it over and over again."
Brusilo said Ukrainians and their president were as determined to fight for Ukraine's independence as they were in 2022.
"We are a sovereign state. We are part of Europe and we will remain that way," he said.
A black-and-white picture
In the weeks after Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the sound of battle on the outskirts of Kiev echoed through streets that were nearly empty. Checkpoints and barricades, sandbag walls and anti-tank “dragon teeth” welded from steel beams lined Kiev’s wide boulevards. At the railway station, 50,000 civilians a day, mostly women and children, boarded trains heading west, away from the advancing Russians. The platforms were packed, and every time a train arrived, there was a fresh panic as people jostled to get on. In those frosty days, with strong winds and snowstorms, the colors of the 21st century seemed to fade like an old black-and-white chronicle that Europeans had until then believed had been safely consigned to the vaults of history. President Zelensky, in the words of Joe Biden, “didn’t want to hear” American warnings that an invasion was imminent. It was one thing for Putin to rattle off Russian weapons. A full-scale invasion with tens of thousands of soldiers and armored columns, however, was certainly a thing of the past.
Putin believed that Russia's powerful and modernized army would quickly deal with its stubborn, independent neighbor and its rebellious president. Ukraine's Western allies also believed that Russia would win quickly. On television channels, retired generals spoke of smuggling small arms to arm Ukrainian partisans, while the West imposed sanctions and hoped for the best.
As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, Germany delivered 5,000 combat helmets instead of assault weapons. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev and a former world heavyweight boxing champion, complained to a German newspaper that it was “a joke.” “What kind of support will Germany send after that—pillows?” he asked.
Zelensky has rejected any idea of leaving the capital, Kiev, and forming a government in exile. He has swapped his presidential dark suit for military fatigues and told Ukrainians in videos and on social media that he will fight alongside them.
Ukraine has repelled a Russian push toward the capital. After the Ukrainians demonstrated that they can fight well, the attitude of the Americans and Europeans has changed. Arms shipments have increased.
“Putin’s mistake was that he was preparing for a parade, not a war,“ recalled a senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, adding: “He didn’t think Ukraine would fight. He thought they would be greeted with speeches and flowers.”
On March 29, 2022, the Russians withdrew from Kiev. Hours after they left, we drove, nervously, through the chaotic, devastated landscape of the Kiev suburbs of Irpin, Bucha, and Gostomel. Along the roads the Russians hoped to use for a triumphal entry into Kiev, I saw the bodies of civilians left where they had been killed. Around some of them were piles of charred tires, a failed attempt to burn evidence of war crimes.
Survivors spoke of the brutality of the Russian occupiers. One woman showed me the grave in which she had buried her son after he had been accidentally shot while crossing the road. Russian soldiers had thrown her out of her house. In the garden they had left piles of empty bottles of vodka, whiskey and gin, which they had looted and drunk. Hastily abandoned Russian camps in the forests by the roads were littered with rubbish that the soldiers had dumped during the weeks of occupation.
Professional and disciplined armies do not eat or sleep next to rotting piles of their own waste.
Three years later, the war had changed. Although Kiev has revived, there are still nightly air raid alerts as its air defenses detect approaching Russian missiles and drones. The war is closer and more deadly along the more than 1,000-kilometer front line that stretches from the northern border with Russia and then east and south to the Black Sea. It is dotted with ruined, almost deserted villages and towns. To the east, in Ukraine’s once industrial heartland of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Russian forces are advancing slowly, with huge losses in manpower and equipment.
Echoes of the past
Last August, Ukraine sent troops into Russian territory, seizing part of Russia’s Kursk region. They are still there, fighting for land that Zelensky hopes to use as bargaining chips.
Along the border with Kursk Oblast, in the snow-covered forests of northeastern Ukraine, the geopolitical storm unleashed by Donald Trump is still little more than a threatening, distant rumble. It will come to that, especially if the US president follows up his sharp and mocking verbal attacks on President Zelensky with a definitive end to military aid and intelligence sharing and, even worse from Ukraine’s perspective, an attempt to impose a peace deal in favor of Russia.
For now, the momentum built up over three years of war continues, and the forest may prove to be a reminder of the blood-soaked 20th century. Fighters move silently through the trees, past trenches, and into bunkers dug deep into the frozen ground. In open areas, the fields are dotted with anti-tank pyramids of concrete and steel.
However, the 21st century is more evident in the dry, warm underground bunkers. Generators and solar panels power laptops and screens connected to the outside world that allow for news viewing.
Just because bad news is coming doesn't mean the soldiers are watching it. In a deep dugout, equipped with beds made of rough boards from the local sawmill, with nails driven into the wood to hang weapons and winter uniforms, 30-year-old Corporal Evgeny says he has more pressing matters to think about - his subordinates and the wife and two young children he left behind when he joined the army ten months ago.
That's a lot of time on the front line in the Kursk region. He looks and sounds like a war veteran. He has clashed with North Koreans, who have been sent to join the fighting there by their leader, Putin's ally Kim Jong-un.
“The Koreans fight to the end. Even if he's wounded and you come to him, he might just blow himself up to take more of us with him,“ says Yevhen.
All the soldiers we interviewed asked to be called by their first names for security reasons. Yevhen seemed calm that he would continue to fight without American help.
“Help is not something that can last forever. Today it is there, tomorrow it is gone,” he added.
Ukraine, he said, is producing much more of its own weapons. That is true, especially when it comes to attack drones, but the United States is still supplying sophisticated weapons systems that have inflicted serious damage on the Russians.
Deep dividing lines
Many of the volunteers who took up arms three years ago have been killed, maimed, or too exhausted to fight any longer. One of the deepest divisions in Ukraine is between those who fight and those who bribe their way out of military service. Yevhen says they are better off without them.
“It is better for them to pay not to fight than to come here and run away, tripping us up. That doesn't bother me much. If they had come here, they would have just run away [...] they are deserters“, says Yevhen.
War removes unnecessary thoughts. The stakes are clear for the soldiers preparing to return to the fighting in the Kursk region. Mykola, who commands a company of airborne troops, speaks fondly of the capabilities of their American-supplied Stryker armored vehicles.
“Kursk shows the enemy, a nuclear-armed state, that a non-nuclear power with a smaller population and a smaller army can come in, seize land, and the Russians can do very little about it,” he says.
Putin's goals, he says, are clear.
”His task is to conquer all of Ukraine, change its legal status, change the president and the government. He wants to destroy our political system and turn Ukraine into his vassal state,” says Mykola.
He laughed when I asked him whether Americans and others should trust Vladimir Putin.
“No! I don't have enough fingers to count how many times Putin has lied. To everyone! To the Russians, to us, to our Western partners. He lied to everyone," Mykola adds.
Growing up in war
At the recruiting center in Kiev in the first days after the invasion, I met two young students - 19-year-old Maksim Lutsik and 18-year-old Dmytro Kisilenko - who had signed up for the army.
As they lined up with men old enough to be their fathers and other teenage recruits, they were wearing camping gear and could have been considered friends at a festival, except for their assault rifles. At the time, I wrote: “18- and 19-year-olds have always gone to war. I thought that was a thing of the past in Europe.“ A few weeks later, Maxim and Dmytro were in uniform, manning a checkpoint just behind the front line in Kiev, still students joking with their parents.
They both fought in the Battle of Kiev. Dmytro chose to leave the army, which was his right as a student volunteer when the fighting shifted east. He prepared to fight again if necessary by training to be an officer at the National Military University. Maxim remained in the army, serving on the front line in the east for over two years. He is now an officer working in military intelligence.
I keep in touch with them because, like millions of other young people here, the war has defined their adult lives in ways they never expected. Trump's overtures to Moscow make them feel almost as if they have to start over.
“We mobilized“, says Dmytro, adding: “We mobilized our resources, our people, and I think it's time to do it again“.
Parallels with the past
Unlike the soldiers in the forest on the border with the Kursk region, they are following the news. Donald Trump's diplomatic and strategic overtures, which began at the Munich Security Conference just 10 days ago, remind them of the infamous deal that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made in Munich in 1938, forcing Czechoslovakia to capitulate to Adolf Hitler's demands.
“There is something familiar“, says Maxim, adding: “The West gives an aggressor the opportunity to occupy some territories. The West makes a deal with the aggressor, with the US playing the role of Great Britain.
“This is a very dangerous moment for the whole world, not just for Ukraine“, Maxim points out, adding: “We see that Europe is starting to wake up [...] but if they wanted to be ready for war, they should have started a few years ago“.
Dmytro agreed about the dangers ahead.
“I think Donald Trump wants to become like a new Neville Chamberlain [...] Trump should focus more on becoming more like Winston Churchill“, says Dmytro.
The Trump Effect
If you’re a real estate developer, as Donald Trump was before he entered the reality TV and then presidential race, demolition makes money. Acquire a property, tear it down, rebuild it, and win. The problem with this foreign policy strategy is that sovereignty and independence have no price. Trump boasts that he puts America first, but he’s not willing to accept that non-Americans might feel the same way about their own countries.
Since Trump was sworn in for his second term as president of the United States, he’s been swinging the bat of destruction. He’s sent Elon Musk to the federal government to recover billions of dollars he says were stolen or wasted. Abroad, Trump the Destroyer has taken on the postulates that underpin the 80-year-old alliance between the United States and European democracies.
Donald Trump is unpredictable, but he has been talking about many of the things he does for years. He is not the first American president to resent the way his European allies have saved money by hiding behind the US defense budget. The phrase used by his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to NATO partners that “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into “Uncle Naive” was a deliberate reference to President Dwight Eisenhower.
A US government document from November 4, 1959, reflects his frustration. It says: “The President said he has been insisting for five years that the State Department present the facts as they are to the Europeans. He believes the Europeans are close to “making Uncle Sam “Uncle Naive“.
Trump wants his money back. He demanded the rights to half a trillion dollars worth of mineral resources from Ukraine. Zelensky refused this deal, saying he could not sell his country. He wants security guarantees in exchange for any concessions.
In private, European politicians and diplomats admit that they, along with Joe Biden, gave Ukraine enough military and financial support not to lose to Russia, but not enough to win. The argument for more of the same is that Russia, weakened by sanctions and depleted of manpower as its generals squander the lives of its own people, will eventually lose a war of attrition. But that is far from certain.
Wars usually end in agreements. Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1945 was a rare occurrence. The criticism of Trump is that he has no real plan, so he has followed his instinct to get closer to Vladimir Putin, a man he admires. Trump seems to believe that strong leaders from the most powerful countries can shape the world as they see fit. The concessions Trump has already offered Putin reinforce the notion that his top priority is normalizing relations with Russia.
Confronting Putin
A more credible plan would involve getting Putin to abandon ideas that are deeply embedded in his geostrategic DNA. One of the most strongly pursued is that Ukraine’s sovereignty should be violated and control of the country returned to the Kremlin, as it was during the Soviet era and before that in the empire of the Russian tsars.
It is hard to imagine how that would happen. It is as unlikely as Ukraine giving up its independence to Moscow. The war in Ukraine is turning Europe’s security architecture upside down. No wonder its leaders are so deeply disturbed by everything they have heard and seen this month.
The challenge for them is to find ways to prevent young people from being forced into the unexpected world of war that has befallen Maksym Lutsyk, the 22-year-old Ukrainian war veteran.
“Everyone has changed and I have changed. I think every Ukrainian has gone through a maturation process in these three years. "Everyone who joined the army, and everyone who fought for so long, changed drastically," said Lucik.
Translation from English: Alexey Margoevsky, BTA