Dreaming of peace

When air raid sirens begin wailing in the middle of the night, Svetlana Prokopiv wakes her children and leads them downstairs. The 45-year-old divorced mother of two, with a bottle-blond pixie haircut and a permanent smile, lives on the top floor of an apartment building in the Shevchenko district of central Kyiv.

What was once a desirable family dwelling has become, under Russian airstrikes, increasingly vulnerable because of its height and its distance from shelter at or below street level.

“I hide with the kids, either on the first floor” or in the “cold garage” underground, Prokopiv explained in a recent interview.

Conditions were tougher this winter, she said, when Russian air assaults targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, often leaving the Prokopiv family without electricity and threatening their water supply and heat. Ukraine’s broader economic struggles, due to energy scarcity, wartime inflation, and mass unemployment make daily life difficult even when Russian projectiles aren’t hurtling toward Ukrainian soil.

PROKOPIV’S EXPERIENCE has been typical for the roughly 32 million Ukrainians still in Ukraine. Since the start of Russia’s invasion three years ago, Ukrainians across the country have endured near-constant attacks from Russian aerial explosives that target residential and energy infrastructure—in other words, civilians. These strikes continued in mid-March, even as Russia claimed to want peace.

But peace is a hard bargain in Ukraine, where soldiers have aggressively defended their country from Russian invaders while the Kremlin strengthens its grip on occupied Ukrainian territory. As U.S. officials press the two countries to reach a ceasefire, average Ukrainians pessimistic about a political solution still hope for a permanent end to Russian attacks.

A Tuesday meeting between U.S. and Ukrainian diplomats in Saudi Arabia was meant to chart a path forward to a ceasefire on the battlefront. Initial post-meeting reports said Ukraine had accepted a U.S. proposal for an immediate, 30-day ceasefire. Russia must now respond, and agree, to that offer. The meeting additionally restored U.S. intelligence sharing and weapons shipments to Ukraine after a weeklong pause.

The results of the Saudi Arabia meeting mark a dramatic about-face in U.S.-Ukraine relations, fewer than two weeks after a highly contentious February White House meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. President Donald Trump, and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. After the flare-up, Trump asserted Zelenskyy was “not ready for peace,” while Zelenskyy asserted that peace was not possible without security guarantees—assurances Trump insisted he would not provide.

The volatile meeting temporarily scuttled an all-but-signed deal between Kyiv and Washington to mine Ukraine’s critical minerals. The country holds large but underdeveloped deposits of metals used in products ranging from cellphones and electric-vehicle batteries to nuclear weapons technologies. Diplomats emerged from the Tuesday meeting saying they still planned to sign a mineral deal.

Following the initial dustup between Kyiv and the United States, European leaders were working to recalibrate a defense posture that offers Ukraine more support and depends less on continued American defense backing—the bedrock of Euro-Atlantic security since the end of World War II.

Trump’s transactional, hard-driving approach to U.S. diplomacy over the war between Russia and Ukraine has caused dismay among Ukraine’s supporters. It’s also prompted accusations that Trump is too willing to defer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump defends his tactics as pragmatic and effective. “If you want to end wars, you have to talk to both sides,” he told Congress.

Within Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s wartime approval ratings have consistently run high. Research published on March 7 from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that 67% of Ukrainians polled said they trusted Zelenskyy. Public trust in the Ukrainian president ticked up after the tumultuous February meeting at the White House.

“At least for now, we are witnessing a process of unification of society against the backdrop of new challenges facing Ukraine,” said Anton Hrushetskyi, the executive director of KIIS.

To make peace, Hrushetskyi noted, the Ukrainian public is “flexible and ready for even painful compromises, but not a compromise that would be capitulation.”

Ukraine’s political leaders have not yet publicly said whether they will accept territorial concessions. The country also previously tied discussion of a ceasefire to Western security guarantees.

Zelenskyy and Trump argue during a Feb. 28 press conference in the Oval Office. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Hrushetskyi’s views largely match Zelenskyy’s own messaging. Posting on the X social network in March, he said Ukraine is pushing to “accelerate peace and strengthen the foundations of security.”

“Ukraine is fully committed to a constructive approach,” Zelenskyy wrote.

Ukraine has long maintained a hard line against forfeiting land for a peace deal. The country reiterated that position just before the diplomatic negotiations in Saudi Arabia. Russia did not attend the meeting.

LIKE PROKOPIV, Yulia Yevstratenko is raising two children through the war. Also blond, wearing a pink sweater, a cross around her neck, and tiny cross earrings to match, the 41-year-old Kyiv native spoke frankly about her habit of leading her family to the bomb shelter below her apartment building. She also revealed how her patterns have changed in what is now the conflict’s fourth year.

“We only take shelter when an attack is coming directly at Kyiv,” she said, speaking beside her friend Prokopiv in early March at a downtown bakery called Boulangerie. The Yevstratenko family used to take cover when alerts sounded for the wider Kyiv oblast, or region.

“Sometimes, we just need to sleep,” she said.

The middle-of-the-night attacks are part of Moscow’s psychological war. The frequent air raid alerts deprive Ukrainians of sleep and much-needed rest from already-high levels of stress they carry during daylight hours.

“No one can understand, who isn’t here. No one gets it,” Yevstratenko said, emphasizing the unique anxiety that comes from years of air raids—and from efforts to protect her family.

Air attacks have come with rising ferocity in recent months, according to newly published data. Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians notched an “all-time high in 2024,” with an approximately 30% rise in incidents leading to Ukrainian noncombatant casualties since 2022, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a U.S.-based research group. The overall number of Russian air attacks on civilians, with or without casualties, more than tripled in 2024, ACLED reported.

While world leaders debate the details of a peace deal, Yevstratenko only sees uncertainty about what could be next: an end to fighting or months of more conflict. She confessed she was not even sure what a positive outcome might look like—or what to hope for.

“We hope for the best, of course,” Yevstratenko said. “But it’s hard to know what’s best for Ukraine.”

For ordinary Ukrainians like Svetlana Prokopiv, a final peace agreement—as well as its intermediate steps—will determine how much longer she must shelter her children from Russian raids. While the current full-scale war dates to the 2022 invasion, the roots of the conflict trace back to Russia’s 2014 takeover of the Donbas region and the southern peninsula of Crimea.

“This has been going on 11 years,” Prokopiv said.

Prokopiv looks at necessary future changes, like modernizing the Ukrainian army, as fundamental to any lasting peace. Yet she criticized her country’s military as corrupt and dysfunctional. In 2022, men signed up en masse out of patriotism and solidarity, which she supported. Now, some Ukrainian men bribe their way out of service and sneak across the border to avoid fighting.

Prokopiv expressed fatigue and disillusionment with both the army and the country’s current political leaders.

“These men protect Zelenskyy and the government,” Prokopiv said. “But do they protect us?”