Friday’s contentious White House meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, following peace talks between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, has the world wringing its hands. More ink has been spilled in recent weeks over who has been jilted in multilateral talks than about the actual situation in the trenches on the Ukraine front. Having just returned from there, I think I can safely say that for those fighting the Russian advance, the basic takeaway is simple: none of it matters.
While heads of state jockey and pontificate, the average Ukrainian defender simply doesn’t give a damn. The fight will go on regardless of whatever separate peace deals are brokered over their heads. Moreover, the threat of withdrawing Western support only further inclines them toward tools of last resort—nuclear and chemical, to be precise. When all other options for defending their freedom and sovereignty have been removed by far-away politicians, Ukrainian citizens will do what they must. This is what national defense looks like. As in the first days of the invasion, the national spirit of resistance is revived.
Members of the 3rd Assault Brigade explained to me (with a gleam in their eye) that they were on a three-day-on, three-day-off rotation in the trenches “for the rest of their lives.” They are annihilating Russian forces with tech-savvy, systematic drone operations that extract enormous injury for every meter lost through Soviet-style, mindless meat-wave assaults. They are tired, but their morale is high. They know their business, and they aren’t reliant on Western arms to continue their fight. They construct their own first-person view (FPV) drones in scrappy yet modern decentralized facilities, building chips and 3D printing components they need in real time and engaging in a hyper-evolutionary engineering cycle to customize their weapons to fit the immediate needs of the day. They cannibalize captured munitions, including Russian anti-tank mines and next-generation anti-tank weapons, to build bespoke drone payloads to wreak maximal devastation on Russian infantry and armor.
I watched every inch of a typical frontline sector being covered in 24/7 drone surveillance in all weather and all spectra: thermal drones picked out the heat signature of Russian footprints in the snow, and FPV drones carefully laid small, custom-made landmines in their path. I watched Ukrainian operators—calmly sipping tea—drop munitions on a Russian soldier in sub-zero temperatures before he could crawl back into his frozen trench position. Yes, the material and manpower odds are stacked in favor of the Russian invaders, but the moral and logistical advantages heavily favor Ukraine. They are nowhere near desperate enough to capitulate.
I toured a heavy-lift drone factory, which assembles the frightful “Baba Yaga”—the “flying witch” that strikes terror into Russian occupiers. The factory, which specialized in agricultural drone sprayers before the war, now beats plowshares into swords by making aerial sprayers that spill defoliants and accelerants on the heads of Russian troops before immolating them with thermite. It takes no great leap of imagination to envision a scenario in which, as a last resort, this factory replaced the contents of the tanks with something even more ghastly. Global censure and condemnation, hollow in any event, seems to them a small price to pay for stopping the collapse of their homeland.
The Soviet Union’s top nuclear engineers were often Ukrainian, and Ukrainian expertise keeps some of the world’s largest nuclear facilities functioning. Their mastery of advanced technology, coupled with a broad and innovative culture of sophisticated engineering, makes the prospect of an organic, homegrown Ukrainian nuclear weapon all but guaranteed if required.
Ukrainians do not harbor the same ingrained horror of nuclear operations that Westerners have been raised with. Thirty years ago, after all, Ukraine was the world’s third-largest nuclear power until security-guaranteed treaties convinced them to give their arsenal to Russia—it takes no special geopolitical expertise to envision Ukraine reappropriating its lost nuclear deterrent if all other avenues are closed.
Ukraine is unlikely to accept separate peace provisions because they know what much of the rest of the world seems willfully blind to: Russia is on its knees. With casualties approaching three-quarters of a million—with some 1,400 casualties added daily—the Russian behemoth is staggering and nearing collapse. It has lost over 10,000 main battle tanks, six times the combined number possessed by the UK, Spain, France, Italy, and Poland. Its economy is teetering, its disparate regions restless, and its federation is fractured. A rapid dissolution is not only possible, it grows increasingly likely.
Yes, Ukraine has suffered substantially, and its people are tired, but the country is far from desperate. Most cities operate entirely normally: café life is vigorous, and families go about their business as if war was a distant thought. It is common now for soldiers to blast away at Russian advances in the morning, then calmly nosh pizza in a quiet street that afternoon. Internal supply lines are a very powerful advantage. The pressure on Ukrainians to accept an imposed “peace” simply isn’t there. Like the early days, when the Ukrainian government opened armories to “allow the Ukrainian people to take whatever they need to defend themselves and their families,” the idea of national resistance remains firm.
Politicos and pundits will gather and quibble in faraway places about Ukraine’s future, but the conclusions they arrive at will be empty, irrelevant scraps of paper to Ukrainians dead set on continuing to fight for their freedom.
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