I watched as a pallid young woman cleaned a small memorial amid a sea of flowers and fluttering blue and yellow flags.
Tenderly, she wiped the portrait of a young man in a military helmet, placed handfuls of white pebbles in a circle at the base, then lit a candle and placed a single cigarette on her shrine to a fallen soldier.
She looked so sad. Her eyes rimmed with red, her face hauntingly similar to the man pictured beside her as she squatted to work in this corner of the Kyiv square that was the birthplace of her country’s fight for freedom.
The memorial showed his name was Yaroslav. His call sign was Rex. And he was a unit commander killed by a Russian drone in Donetsk at just 27 – just one of the many lives remembered amid this fast-growing tide of tributes and mementos to a nation’s slain heroes.
‘I loved him so much,’ said Snizhanna, 27, weeping as she spoke about the pain of losing her only sibling, who worked as a barman in happier times.
‘When people die it is such huge tragedy. It’s very difficult to go through this misfortune.’
So much grief, so many tears in this agonised nation that displayed such fortitude following Russia’s savage assault.
Yet as Ukraine prepares for another Christmas at war, slender hopes for peace are shrinking in this troubled corner of the earth.
It is hard to find Ukrainians with faith in President Donald Trump’s professed desire for peace, let alone who believe that Russia’s despotic Vladimir Putin might be dissuaded from continuing to rip apart their bloodied nation.
Can this battered country and its shattered people – now facing a fourth year of full-scale war – stay strong amid substantial battlefield losses, power cuts, a stagnating economy, population decline and, now, bitter disillusionment with a government embroiled in a sordid scandal?
Certainly, no one denies the difficulties of daily life when I return to a country I have reported on extensively since the 2014 pro-democracy protests in that flag-filled square, the start of a decade of hope and turmoil.
Iryna Shemko, mother of two small boys, explained the struggles of living in a flat on the 14th floor when, on some days, there is no power for 16 hours thanks to Russia’s intensifying attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure.
Kyiv is a European capital, but without electricity, this family has no lift, heating, water or internet.
She admits it is ‘very exhausting’ carrying an infant plus his stroller up and down the stairs, especially when her older boy throws tantrums on the long climb up. She tries to leave home only once a day. But then the boys get bored stuck in their flat, unable even to watch cartoons.
Like everyone I spoke to in Kyiv, her family has adapted to routine power cuts.
‘We bought a little gas stove to cook and warm up food for the kids, we use a power bank for the router, we have torches and candles, so it’s manageable,’ says Shemko, 28.
Although chronic energy blackouts have become part of Ukraine’s wartime way of life, the increased ferocity of strikes on urban centres – Russia no longer makes even the pretence of aiming at military targets – fuels a mood of grinding weariness.
One pensioner told me how their house shakes and his wife panics when Patriot missiles are fired in reply to waves of Russian drones and missiles. But he trusts the religious icon beside his bed to protect them as he tries to sleep through the battles in the skies above their heads.
Another woman – a mother in her 40s who moved recently from Kharkiv – said the attacks on Kyiv are now worse than those on her former home city.
Once the capital of Ukraine, Kharkiv sits close to the border and has been remorselessly targeted by Putin’s forces. ‘They are massive, much more intense, they last for hours and the combination of different weapons is horrible. Russia sends first drones, then missiles, then drones again. There is nowhere to hide from these attacks,’ said Maria, who works in publicity.
‘I sit there hoping they are not going to hit my apartment. You can’t sleep. There have been several moments when drones were so close I thought the next one would hit our home.
‘In the morning you see more apartment blocks are hit, more people killed in their beds, more houses are ruined.
‘This feels very threatening. But if you have a job, it is expected in the morning you go to your workplace and continue your duties.
‘We live in a situation where Russia wants to kill you at night, but you have to keep going by day because your country has to keep going. People are very tired. Everyone wants the war to be over.’
Polling, however, still indicates unyielding resolve. A recent survey by New Europe Centre, a think tank, found that two-thirds of Ukrainians oppose any negotiations with Russia without strong security guarantees. Otherwise, they fear, Moscow would simply renew its attacks after a brief pause.
Record numbers – more than eight in ten – oppose key points in Trump’s recent (and seemingly Kremlin-inspired) peace plan.
These include demands that Kyiv recognises Russia’s occupation of terrain stolen from Ukraine, that Kyiv limits the size of its armed forces and that it grants official status to the Russian language.
‘Ukrainians want peace, but it must be fair and lasting,’ said New Europe Centre director Sergiy Solodkyy. ‘If you want peace in this part of the world, the key question is how to guarantee security and deter Russia from renewed aggression.’
Meanwhile Russian troops grind forward in the east and south of the country, ‘100 metres one day, a kilometre the next’ in the resigned words of one former Luhansk governor over coffee.
Ukrainian officials believe that, at this rate, it will take Putin a minimum of 12 more months and further massive losses to seize the heavily fortified chunk of Donbas region still in Kyiv’s hands.
A soldier, whose son is also fighting, said no Ukrainian troops would agree to hand over land they are spilling blood to defend.
‘They can try and take it, but many more Russian pigs will die trying,’ said Maksym, 48. ‘I don’t believe Trump can stop the war, but I also don’t believe we can win without the US, without American support, their weapons and money. I’m hoping for some sort of ceasefire, but it will not be the end of the war. And we are here until the end.’
This leaves President Volodymyr Zelensky with a nightmare dilemma: whether to accept a terrible and unpopular deal pushed by the White House in league with the Kremlin, or carry on the fight, losing more people and land to a nation with much greater human resources.
‘There are no good solutions in this situation,’ admitted a senior state source.
Another government adviser noted that, by next month, Russia will have been fighting for longer than in the Second World War.
And that, far from planting its flag triumphantly over a defeated nation’s parliament building, as it did in Berlin in 1945, Putin is struggling to take small Ukrainian cities such as Kupiansk lying just 25 miles from his own border.
Residents of Kupiansk such as Anna, 72, a retired food engineer, endured seven months of Russian occupation, then the joy of liberation in September 2022. Now she has fled the latest fighting and sits helplessly watching the news as the enemy presses closer.
‘I’m alive, I have a roof over my head and food in my fridge. But it is very painful to watch the bombs dropped on streets that I know so well, the places I visited with my family, on all the things that matter so much to me.’
This elderly woman now hates Russians, like so many of her fellow citizens.
‘They left me with nothing. I have nothing to pass to my children. I don’t even have photographs of my parents and sisters. I can’t go back, even to my husband’s grave, to see the place I lived all my life.’ Her story highlights how, beneath the bustling veneer of ordinary life in Ukraine’s cafes, offices and shops, this is a stressed and traumatised society. Arguments erupt on the streets over minor issues.
A woman whose husband died on the front line said she found it hard to talk with male friends not in the military, adding that three female friends had joined up recently. She was contemplating doing the same.
People are bombarded with daily text messages on their phones urging them to sign up. Billboards on the streets demand the same. This is a sensitive subject, especially given the high number of desertions and the widespread bribery used to escape conscription. When martial law was changed to allow men aged 18 to 22 to leave Ukraine, it released a new exodus of refugees.
‘I’m really lucky my husband is not in hiding, otherwise I’d divorce him,’ smiled Katerina, 38, an English teacher married to an actor-turned-soldier.
‘It is a complicated situation. You must be ready to die.
‘I am not judging. But I always stop people if they try to make excuses [for not joining up]. They don’t see the other side of my life – holidays alone, rocket attacks alone, bomb shelters alone. I am always alone since my husband is fighting.’
Then Katerina, who has seen more than 20 friends killed in this grotesque war, looked down at her six-year-old boy and began to cry.
‘When I see my son, I realise so many mothers lost their sons,’ she sobbed.
‘We know they were once this little, they went to the cinema, like all those guys who died – and then there are those grown-ups who can’t grab their balls to go and try.
‘If you are not ready to fire a gun, go and program drones. There are many ways in the military.’
Katerina was not the only one close to tears.
Liydmila, a food quality expert visiting her daughter in Kyiv, started weeping as she described enemy forces getting closer to her house in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, historic home of the Cossack warriors who fought Moscow in the past. Her distress is all the more profound since she was born in Russia, where her relatives now spout Putin’s propaganda. ‘The mood is very dark,’ she said. ‘Our children are dying.’
Little wonder there is such anger over the corruption scandal, amid claims that Zelensky’s former business partner skimmed off $100million from energy contracts (which he denies) and forced out his chief of staff.
Yet for all the fury, many citizens seem resigned to accepting the corruption and fighting on. And every single person I met ruled out giving up land to stop the war.
Putin is demanding much of southern and eastern Ukraine, including a slab of Donbas containing four major cities – part of the fantasy he describes as ‘Novorossiya’ or New Russia. But as one leading doctor put it, Ukrainians know life would be far worse under Moscow’s repressive rule.
Volodymyr Kharytonov, senior child psychiatrist at a Kyiv children’s hospital, knows better than most how destructive the war has been for the future of Ukraine and its children.
He detailed a study conducted into a single class of 42 pupils aged 12 and 13 in a Ukrainian town which had been briefly occupied by Russia. Almost all the children there suffered from anxiety, two-thirds had depression and one in five held suicidal intentions.
‘We don’t know yet if this is the result of occupation, bombing or the whole process of war, but it gives us a very grim perspective on the future,’ said Kharytonov.
He told me about a 12-year-old suffering flashback visions of his bloodied mother after seeing his parents blown up in their home when returning from the local shop. Another traumatised boy could not let his mother out of his sight, even when she went to the lavatory.
‘There are thousands of kids like this, especially on or near the front line,’ he said. ‘This changes our future. If we don’t act immediately with post-traumatic stress disorder, it is harder to help. These mental health issues can alter the lives of children if they’re unable to function normally.’
Meanwhile, with just one birth registered for every three deaths, Ukraine faces demographic disaster. Male life expectancy has plunged from 65.2 years to 57.3. Its pre-war population of 42 million has shrunk to 36 million with refugees fleeing abroad and territory grabbed by the Russians.
One of the men tasked with rebuilding the country, however, explained how Ukraine is already reconstructing damaged areas in readiness for future attacks as the authorities install fortified power and water supplies, bomb shelters built under homes and solar-powered battery systems to keep lifts and lights working during blackouts.
‘We are building the entire infrastructure for people living in war conditions,’ said Serhiy Sukhomlyn, head of the State Agency for Infrastructure Restoration and Development.
He said that one new facility was recently hit 13 times by drones yet carried on working.
As Sukhomlyn put it, ensuring that people feel confident in their future is key to their salvation.
He pointed to the divided Korean peninsula as a potential model, with its clear line of demarcation between a brutal dictatorship in the north and ‘modern civilisation in which people can thrive’ in the south.
It highlights why this official, like so many Ukrainians, opposes capitulating to Russia under Trump’s dismal peace plan.
‘Imagine a gang seized part of your house, killed your wife and injured your child,’ he said.
‘The police come and say: ‘Well, they are stronger. So let’s get agreement on how you will live together in this house. You don’t want to be confrontational with them.’
‘This kills all prospects for this family, of plans for the future, since they have to live in a house with those who killed their relatives and seized part of their property. This is what affects the mood of Ukraine’s inhabitants the most.’
