Ukrainians wrestle with the cost of peace

Nazar Zabavsky looks too young to be headed for the army. The slim, redheaded college student is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in political science. He’s also, at just 20 years old, a candidate to become an officer in the Ukrainian infantry.

Zabavsky grew up in western Ukraine but now lives in Kyiv. He summed up the way many city residents feel about the state of the war—and the international efforts for peace now unfolding.

“We don’t want to lose our territories, we don’t want to lose our people, but we think it is inevitable,” Nabavsky told me, speaking by video call. The camera showed him in a sweatshirt, reference books stacked behind him.

The third anniversary of Russia’s 2022 invasion comes amid a diplomatic blitz on Ukraine. A potential peace deal, and myriad war-related interests, have pushed geopolitics among Ukraine, Russia, European countries, and the United States into overdrive.

But that flurry of effort has so far advanced ideas many Ukrainians find hard to stomach. Some fear they might be made a secondary player in their own peace process. Last week’s talks between Moscow and Washington revived long-running fears of a “dictated peace” in which Ukraine might be constrained to accept conditions under duress and dwindling support from once-enthusiastic allies.

When asked if he was optimistic about Ukraine’s future once an eventual peace begins, Zabavsky could only say “maybe.”

“I realize there may be 10 to 15 harsh years, after it’s all done,” Zabavsky said. He noted that Ukraine’s war debts, ruined infrastructure, scattered diaspora, and uncertain security standing will all require support, all at the same time.

A soldier mourns at the Memorial Wall of Fallen Defenders of Ukraine in Kyiv, on the third anniversary of Russia's invasion. AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko

Ukraine marked today’s anniversary with a somber ceremony. President Volodymyr Zelensky, joined by his wife and several Western leaders, laid candles at a soldiers’ memorial in central Kyiv’s Maidan Square. In a post on X, Zelensky paid tribute to “three years of absolute heroism by our people.”

While the push for peace in Ukraine has produced a dizzying barrage of news developments, the overall demands haven’t changed. 

Two conditions dominate Ukraine’s stance. First: territorial integrity. Ukraine appears unwilling, as of now, to forfeit any land within its pre-war borders, including the southern peninsula of Crimea and large parts of the eastern Donbas region that Russia annexed in 2014. Ukraine’s second condition is a demand for strong security guarantees, like weapons and military support ultimately backed by the United States, to discourage a future Russian invasion. 

“We want peace very much, but we need real security guarantees,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. 

But Russia has ruled out giving up ground it took by force. It also wants a neutralized Ukrainian military, with the added promise from Western countries that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO or other Western security alliances. Russia is even demanding full control of four Ukrainian oblasts, or districts: Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Kherson and Zaporizhia in the south. Russia now controls most but not all of those oblasts. 

European countries, represented in NATO and the European Union, have only asserted that they want “peace through strength” for Ukraine. They likewise hope to avoid a “fragile ceasefire” that would only give way to more fighting. 

Discussion remains ongoing about a potential European peacekeeping force on the ground in Ukraine, which would enforce an eventual peace deal, akin to the NATO troops deployed in Kosovo after the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But even that idea is “completely premature” while the war continues to grind on, according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The United States is pushing hard to set the terms of a potential peace. Meeting with top Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a U.S.-Russia effort with “high-level teams” to advance a peace process diplomatically, according to a summary from the U.S. State Department. It also said the two countries would “lay the groundwork” for “historic economic and investment opportunities.” 

Those may include lifting U.S. economic sanctions against Russia and a return by U.S. oil companies to the Russian market. Large firms including ExxonMobil and Shell left Russia amid the outbreak of full-scale war in February 2022.   

Ukraine was not present,or even invited, to the meeting in Saudi Arabia. The United States also disappointed Ukraine this month when U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, speaking to a large gathering of European countries and NATO members, dismissed as “unrealistic” the possibility of Ukraine keeping all of its territory or restoring its 2014 borders. Hegseth also brushed aside the idea of Ukrainian membership in NATO, a long-desired objective of Zelenskyy’s. NATO membership requires U.S. approval.

But Washington and Kyiv are working on a bilateral agreement over Ukraine’s natural mineral resources. A Ukrainian cabinet official said talks stood in their “final stages” before a confirmed deal.

U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg (left) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meet in Kyiv on Feb. 20, 2025. AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka

Max Lébed grew up in Kharkiv city and moved to Kyiv for work five years ago. The 29-year-old is now an assistant manager and bartender at the trendy Café Zigzag in downtown Kyiv. Next month, he will enter the Ukrainian army.

Lébed freely admits that he is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who speaks Ukrainian “pretty badly,” touching on a hot-button issue in Ukraine, even from before the war. Russia’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine include a so-called “liberation” of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking regions.

With excellent English, extensive tattoos, and an intellectual bent to his words, he perceives the current moment as the start, not the end, of Ukraine’s 21st-century armed defense against Russia.

“I’m not optimistic,” he said of the current diplomatic efforts, dismissing them as implausible. “I don’t believe in that kind of peace.”

Lébed predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin might desist in fighting under a peace deal—only to wage new violence later.

“Maybe he will stop for four years,” for the second Trump term, he said. “And then, he will attack one more time.”

Despite his disdain for the current peace negotiations, Lébed hastened to express his thanks to America for its recent years of solidarity with Ukraine in wartime. He said he understood that not all Americans feel an affinity with Ukraine, and not all know its history and its differences from undemocratic neighbors like Russia and Belarus, which has assisted Russia throughout the war.

If Putin decided to renew his aggression in the future, Lébed fears Russia might finally vanquish Ukraine. “For me, the most scary part in my life is the inability to come back home” one day, he said. The possibility of a complete Russian occupation of Ukraine would transform Lébed’s homeland as he knows it.

Oleksandr Skalozubov, 24, is looking for a change in his, and his country’s, outlook. Thin and sensitive, he is out of work, an embodiment of Ukraine’s nearly 17 percent unemployment rate. Skalozubov is a native of Balakliya, in eastern Kharkiv oblast. Russian forces occupied the town from March to September 2022. Skalozubov moved to Kyiv in May that year seeking safety, and opportunity.

As we talked, he leaned over the Zigzag’s bar in seeming discomfort. On the war’s costs to Ukrainians, he summarized his feelings as “really difficult to describe in a particular way.”

The fighting and damage, not least in his home region, which borders Russia, was “really horrible for people.” Ukrainians are still “going through a lot of trauma,” he said, and have suffered the “loss of close people, friends.” At this he paused, staring at the floor, and appeared to be fighting back tears.

“People want peace, and just to live their life,” he finally said.

Skalozubov felt it was hard to expect what he called an “honest peace,” where negotiations involve compromise and fairness from Russia. The prospect of territorial loss means forfeiting Ukrainian ground that is, for him, very close to home.

Conceding land is “obviously not an honest way” of making peace, he said. “But I understand it is one of the very possible [most likely] ways of doing peace. Unfortunately.”

An office building destroyed after a Russian attack that injured multiple in Kyiv on Feb. 12, 2025. AP Photo/Alex Babenko

That sense of resignation extends beyond Kyiv’s youngest adults. For Dmitro Kasyanenko, a 44-year-old lawyer, justice must figure in any peace settlement—with the full force of legal penalties for Russian belligerence.

“The key point is that this peace cannot be achieved through concessions to the aggressor,” he explained, from his sunny office in the culture-rich Zóloti Voróta, or Golden Gates, neighborhood. “No territorial compromises, no ‘neutral statuses’ [e.g., Russia’s demand that Ukraine never join NATO], no forgiveness of Russian crimes.”

Kasyanenko expressed admiration for Trump’s first term, and not just in words. In his office he keeps a bright red MAGA hat, as well as the 2021 memoir of Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who served in the first Trump White House. Kellogg is currently the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, and visited Kyiv in mid-February.

“During his presidency, Trump did not start a single new war—this is a fact that speaks for itself,” Kasyanenko said.

The lawyer also agreed with the U.S. president’s goal to end the war as soon as possible. “A protracted conflict is exhausting not only to Ukraine, but the entire world community.”

Yet Kasyanenko, like millions of Ukrainians, insists that the country’s foreign stakeholders recognize the existing body of international law, from territorial integrity to basic legal protections of human life and liberty.

“No diplomacy can be an excuse for the loss of our lands and freedoms,” Kasyanenko said.

Ukrainian soldiers kneel during a funeral ceremony for civilians killed during a Russian attack on a residential building in Dykanka, Ukraine. AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka

Nazar Zabavksy, a Christian who attends the Word of Truth Bible Church in Kyiv, sees the war, and any peace awaiting his country, in Biblical terms. He notes the differences that Scripture offers between personal animosity, like a fistfight or a two-person conflict, and a battle between countries. He quoted Jesus’ exhortation from Matthew 5:39 to “turn the other cheek” toward an aggressor. 

“It’s not about an enemy of the state” in that case, he reasoned. “It’s personal.” 

Yet for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the situation changes, he said. State authorities hold a right under God to fight, wage war, and kill. He quoted 1 Peter 2:14, where the disciple points to God and refers to “governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong.” 

Themes of the state and self-preservation, including in a defensive war with an outside enemy, are top of mind for the young believer as he prepares for military service. 

Without a robust response to Russia, “we are just prolonging this chain of evil,” he said. “It’s a question of existing. We will be, or we will not be.” 

Zabavksy’s parents have, with reluctance, come to support their son’s decision to join Ukraine’s fighting ranks. 

“There were no other choices,” Zabavsky said. “I wanted to do it, and they accepted my choice.” He said his mother, who went with him the day he first tried on his uniform, expressed both motherly pride and fear: “I like how you look in this uniform. But I don’t want to see you in it.” 

His parents’ conflicted feelings are especially poignant because they have no other children. Peace or no peace, their only son is going off to serve. 

“Our generation in Ukraine has one big problem,” Zabavsky explained, capturing the reality of young people who might be born, fight, and die within the first quarter of the century. He and others coming of age now have known war with Russia since 2014—half their lifetimes. 

“We have to get older very quick. It’s about responsibility, it’s about mindset, it’s about knowing what death is.”