President Vladimir Putin’s arrival at the Alaska summit on August 15 effectively marked his return from diplomatic isolation within the Western world. Here in Kyiv, many Ukrainians have accepted that the United States can no longer be treated as a true ally, but were not prepared to see a group of US troops kneeling in front of the state aircraft, rolling out a literal red carpet for a war criminal.
After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s White House visit in July, the Russian leader is the second head of state with an International Criminal Court warrant on his head that US President Donald Trump has welcomed for a state visit.
Russia currently occupies just shy of 115,000 sq km of Ukrainian territory, an area fractionally larger than New Zealand’s North Island. This makes up about a fifth of Ukraine’s total land mass. Some 3.5 million people live under Russian occupation.
Trump continues to insist “there will be land swapping going on”. Putin has suggested that to accept a peace deal he needs to see territory ceded far past the area Russia has currently annexed in the Donbas region, which includes Luhansk (now almost entirely occupied) and, more significantly, Donetsk, which is about 70% occupied.
The Donbas region was once Ukraine’s industrial hub, and is the source of many of its rare earth, oil and gas deposits. The pressure from Russia to cede the 30% of Donetsk oblast [region] held by Ukraine is viewed with suspicion. Donetsk contains a 50km stretch of defensive structures and fortified settlements developed since the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the region began in 2014.
This stretch is often referred to as the “fortress belt”, running from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk to the north, to Druzhkivka and Kostyantynivka in the south. Surrendering it to Russia could enable troops to far more easily sweep into central Ukraine should Russia violate peace terms and mount another offensive, as many suspect is likely.
“We wanted to fight for Crimea [in 2014], but our partners in the US and Nato told us not to,” Sergei Bessarab, then deputy head of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Kiwi reporter Tom Mutch in a 2018 interview reflecting on the very beginning of the war before the full-scale invasion in 2022. The Western powers instead convinced Ukraine that ceding Crimea would satiate Putin and offset the possibility of the conflict expanding. Eleven years later, it is easy to see how similar advice from the Trump administration does not exactly hold up.
Lialia and David: Holding their position
Living in Ukraine, to open my Instagram feed in the morning is to prepare myself for total cognitive dissonance. In mid-July, the first post I see reads, “Side by side in action: Lialia and David holding their position. July 14, 2025 – 4.35am.”
The footage is of a female soldier in her early 40s in an artillery dugout. She sports braided pigtails and thick eyeliner, chuckling as she takes the footage. The tall man crouching next to her is paused, holding a mortar shell, listening intently to the rounds fired in their direction. He is David Chichkan, an artist of anarchist sympathies who, addressing significant manpower shortages, made public appeals to Ukrainians, no matter their political disposition, to join in the defence of the country against its totalitarian occupier. Russia, he said, was the exemplar of modern fascism.
Lialia, whose birth name is Olha Serdiuk, is a mother of two. Aged 43, she joined the Ukrainian armed forces, in her words, “because she was tired of watching men hide from recruiters”.
This was the last footage recorded of Serdiuk and Chichkan. Three weeks later, both were shot and killed while repelling an assault by Russian troops advancing in Zaporizhzhia oblast, in the south.
Lilia Kislitsyna
For Lilia Kislitsyna, Donetsk will always be home. “This is the place of my ancestry. It is where my parents are buried, my grandparents are buried, where my great-grandparents are buried.” She describes the soil as “dark, rich, black. You can grow anything there”.
She beams as she describes the Donetsk landscape with me over Zoom, before turning to the fact the Soviet Union’s rapid and crude industrialisation contaminated many areas of the region.
Born in Sloviansk, she moved to nearby Kramatorsk after marriage. Now, both cities are extremely close to the most dangerous stretch of the front line, with Russian troops within 10km of Kramatorsk. Kislitsyna has had to flee the city twice. First, when it was occupied by pro-Russian separatists in April 2014. She says she was on a list kept by the occupying authorities due to her “pro-Ukrainian stance”, along with many of her colleagues. This could have meant her execution or transfer to an internment camp. She returned when the city was retaken by the Ukrainian armed forces three months later, but was forced to flee again come the 2022 full-scale invasion.
Now based in Lviv, near the Polish border, she has returned three times since 2022 to visit family in their 70s and 80s who refuse to leave, even under heavy bombardment. When the first incursion began in 2014, “They didn’t have water, they didn’t have electricity, they didn’t have gas. Everything was turned off. We were doing everything we could to try to get my mother-in-law out. But she will never leave because every one of her relatives is buried there.”
Kislitsyna established Smarta, an NGO advocating for improvements in women’s rights in Ukraine. She is also the co-ordinator of Donetsk 1325, a coalition of NGOs, which among other matters, draw attention to the deterioration of women’s rights in occupied Donetsk.
“In occupied territories, you don’t have women’s rights. You don’t even have human rights,” she says. “POWs and others held in captivity who have returned to Ukraine [say] the vast majority have been victims of sexual violence – both women and men. There is no justification in the 21st century for an army to be using sexual violence as a part of war.”
Female bodies have become another front of the Putin regime’s obsessive attempts to control both the Russian and occupied Ukrainian populations, with some measures downright absurd. The state comes to invade every facet of personal life.
In January, a woman in occupied Crimea was fined 50,000 roubles (NZ$1050) for allegedly promoting a “child-free lifestyle” on her social media accounts.
Kislitsyna says Ukraine, in comparison, has made great strides to improve women’s rights in recent years. For her, the decades of progress would be totally erased were Ukrainian territories to be formally ceded.
Watching footage of the Alaska summit – seeing Putin walk down the red carpet to be embraced by President Trump – she recounts, “My whole body rejected it.
“How can we accept them shaking hands? What are they shaking hands in honour of? How could you shake the hands of somebody who is ready and willing to throw away the lives of millions of his civilians in a foreign land? I do not understand how two people have the power and the right to make life-altering decisions, not only for myself and my circle, but for the people of Kherson and Donetsk and Luhansk. How can they make decisions while not representing them?”
When I ask her about troop shortages and the unreliability of US support, she is insistent Ukraine should make no compromises. “We need to defend our freedom. We need to defend our future. And, of course, we will win. In every story, good always wins. Light always defeats darkness.” She swiftly follows by qualifying, “But what is most important is the question of time. And whether or not we will be alive to see that victory. But I have faith that I will.”
Kislitsyna hopes she will eventually return to living on the rich, black soil of a free Donetsk where her ancestors are buried.
Daniel ‘Detcom’
Daniel “Detcom” forewarned me before our interview that he was restless and preferred not to stay in one place for too long. “PTSD I guess,” he texts, followed by an enigmatic eclipsed moon-face emoji.
Detcom is both a call sign and a stage name for Daniel; he is both a junior sergeant and an electronic musician, who, when back from the front line, organises occasional raves and DJs at them. We are both on our way to Brave Factory Festival, one of Kyiv’s best-known music festivals, at Dovzhenko Studios, a massive, repurposed Soviet film studio complex. We meet nearby at a pizza franchise for a beer beforehand.
Raised in Donetsk oblast, Detcom was living in Kyiv at the start of the full-scale invasion and joined the 206th Battalion of the Territorial Defence Forces. He served in several very high-risk areas on the front in many positions – rifleman, drone operator, driver and administrative and psychological support roles. He has since transferred to a unit in the Ukrainian army’s K-2 regiment, which specialises in cutting-edge drone innovation and combat.
He was extremely sceptical that anything would come from the Alaska summit, as he believes Russia has no true interest in peace. “I knew from the beginning that it will not get any results. Because even during the summit, there were air-raid alarms and Shahed drones flying anywhere, and missile strikes. Yeah, we’ve seen it before, like in 2022, when [Russia and Ukraine] had this first meeting in Turkey: Russian soldiers were slaughtering civilians in northern parts of Kyiv region. So, yeah, it’s all just empty.”
Peace talks feel like meaningless political theatre, a world completely removed from the realities of the front line. “Nobody gave a single fuck. Because, well, they are talking, they are meeting, they’re doing this, they’re doing that, they’re tweeting this – but who cares about Twitter? We had a situation on our hands – enemy is approaching from that direction, enemy is trying to get near. Enemy drones are flying down Konstiantynivka. So, we never paid much attention.”
When I ask Detcom about one of Russia’s conditions for peace – that Ukraine agrees to never become a Nato member, and Trump ruling out Ukraine’s inclusion in the coalition – he says coolly he is not particularly concerned about Nato membership anyway, pointing out its forces have not been involved in a conventional war, and hence may lack the combat experience to adapt to the war in Ukraine.
“It was pretty hard for them to move to where they are now,” he says of Russia’s slight rollback on its original demands. “And they’re still having a hard time. Yeah, they have an initial breakthrough, but it cost them a lot.”
In Donetsk, he says, Russia was able to seize Bakhmut, but it took close to a year, and there were estimates that an average of 800 Russian soldiers were being killed each day. He doesn’t think Russia has the resources to sustain the war at this rate. “Also, if I’m not mistaken, Russian economy is going kind of into recession.”
We finish our interview inside the festival venue. The dance floor is heaving by the end of the night. A veteran limps through the crowd, adjusting to a new prosthetic leg.
‘A leg for freedom’
At a house party on the Left Bank, the younger half of Kyiv east of the Dnipro River, we take shots of coconut liqueur. It is very typical to toast to a particular theme in Ukraine. First, we toast one another, then I offer the second toast, “za svobodu”, to freedom. The third round, someone toasts “za peremohu”, to victory, and I repeat after them. The man opposite looks at me directly. He acknowledges, “I don’t believe in victory anymore.” The tone of the room shifts.
Western powers convinced Ukraine that ceding Crimea would satiate Putin
Several men at the party have kept a low profile for years, hiding from conscription officers. Certain lines of work or legal resources can grant exemption from mobilisation, but several here do not fall into this category. Many resisted joining because the only way to be demobilised was to receive an injury (except in highly specific circumstances, such as a family member needing intensive care).
“It’s so stupid, but I have thought about this – if I had the opportunity to go in the army and lose my leg, and come back from the front faster, I would choose this way,” one says. “A leg for freedom,” another jokes.
Then the conversation turns to whether it would be better to lose a leg or an arm. All conclude the worst fate would be to be shot between the legs.
Several at the party seem to feel freezing the front lines as they now stand may be the best option for Ukraine. One is prepared for territory to be ceded, even the remainder of Donbas not yet seized by Russia.
Even were this deal made, they acknowledge Russia would likely continue its incursion in the future regardless. But as they see it, at least their lives would no longer be fossilised. They would be free to leave Ukraine.
Zlata Stefanchuk
Zlata Stefanchuk was a law student in Vienna, home on holiday in Kyiv, when the 2022 full-scale invasion began. She made an active decision to remain in Ukraine to support her country. We lined up a Zoom call on August 24, Ukrainian independence day. Stefanchuk recently completed her masters in EU law, an internship at the European Parliament, and has been involved in various initiatives committed to working towards EU integration for Ukraine.
Reflecting on diplomatic progress since the Alaska summit, she feels Ukraine in fact had a “small victory”. “Trump accepted the formula that any territorial issues will be discussed with Ukraine, which breaks the Kremlin’s desire to resolve the issue one-on-one, which they tried to do during their Alaska meeting.”
In addition, she stresses, “We heard the reaffirming from Trump, specifically on the security guarantees, which has never occurred before.”
Several days before the summit, Trump expressed disdain for the fact territorial concessions to Russia might require constitutional approval. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval,” Trump said.
Stefanchuk confirms this issue is not debatable. “In our constitution is article 73 … issues concerning changes to the territory of Ukraine shall be resolved exclusively by an all-Ukrainian referendum, which means the decision shall depend solely on the Ukrainian people, and not the government.”
She notes it is very difficult to organise such a referendum under wartime conditions because of concerns of Russian interference and the use of force to interrupt the referendum process.
How does she think the population would respond to the notion of territorial concessions? “I would say, negatively, absolutely negatively. The issue of territorial concessions … has been ever since 2014. I mean, everything we stood for during the Revolution of Dignity [which led to the overthrow of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014] and during all the other years that followed, I’d say it’s unfair to people who have given their lives to protect people and to make sure Ukraine will be free and independent. It’s a very sensitive issue.”
A poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in May and June concluded 68% of respondents opposed the idea of officially recognising “some parts” of occupied land as Russian, while 24% are open to making territorial concessions; 78% were against the idea of giving up on land still controlled by Ukraine.
As to how the war may end, Stefanchuk stresses Ukraine needs to continue to fight to achieve “a just and lasting peace, and not just peace no matter the price, because we already paid a huge price. These are the lives of people who were some of the greatest in our nation, truly. I have lost a lot of my friends, and it’s truly difficult to feel this pain through each and every single day.”
Ukraine, she says, should continue to fight until it has meaningful security guarantees and a “reliable security architecture”, which would require much-needed transformation of the structure of the United Nations. “It may seem very naive, very idealistic – but I think if we won’t hold these values to the top, knowing that it will be hard to achieve them, there will be nothing achieved in the end.”
Acknowledging that this reliable, lasting peace could take some time to reach, Stefanchuk observes that in Ukraine, everyone’s sense of time has fundamentally shifted.
“Ukrainians are not really asking of whether peace is closer. They’re really asking what we can do right now to bring it closer and to survive another day.”