Svitlana Moronets

April 11, 2025

I’ve come to Kyiv to report on a potential ceasefire, but the nightly explosions outside my window suggest there isn’t going to be one any time soon.

Iranian Shahed drones are attacking the capital as usual. I still have to fight the instinct to go out onto my balcony and watch them streak through the sky. I’m staying on the eighth floor of an old Soviet apartment block – it’s high enough to catch drone debris when Ukrainian air defences shoot them down. I tell myself the concrete walls will hold. Or, to be honest, I just don’t want to go down to the freezing bomb shelter again. It’s been snowing all week.

It’s been a month since Ukraine agreed to a full, unconditional 30-day ceasefire under immense pressure from Donald Trump’s administration. Moscow rejected it outright, refusing to agree unless Kyiv stopped conscripting men and military aid from the West was cut off. Then came more conditions: Vladimir Putin demanded relief from sanctions and the installation of a ‘temporary’ government in Ukraine under UN supervision. Trump said the proposal had made him ‘very angry’, and he threatened to put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia. In the end, he did nothing. No deadlines. No consequences. No ceasefire.

Whatever hope Ukrainians had that the fighting and the dying might pause has faded. Russia has launched at least 70 missiles and 2,200 drones at Ukraine since the ceasefire proposal. The country is still mourning the nine children killed last week in Kryvyi Rih. A Russian Iskander missile, filled with cluster bombs, struck a playground. It sliced through metal swings, shattered windows and tore through bodies. Twenty people died in total. The youngest victim was three years old.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence claimed, in typical fashion, that it was a ‘successful’ strike on a gathering of Ukrainian and foreign military personnel. But there were no soldiers on the playground or in the restaurant nearby, only families. Kryvyi Rih is Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown; Putin is terrorising it for revenge.

My own village lies far to the west and is considered relatively safe. There are no military targets – except for a school, or maybe a hospital Russia could consider worth a strike. But the war leaves its mark here, too. It arrives in caskets from the front. A family friend, 56, was buried recently. He was killed near Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, two months after being called up. Men his age are sent straight into infantry, to the trenches. They don’t last long. He was given a hero’s funeral, with hundreds of people lining the road to the cemetery, throwing flowers as the procession passed. I can only hope his children found some kind of comfort in that, but I don’t think they did.

After the funerals, silence returns. The men who haven’t been taken to war stay indoors. Children study in the school bomb shelter during air raid alerts. There aren’t many of them – Ukraine now has the lowest birth rate in the world. Parents smuggle their sons abroad before they turn 16, before the state can put them on the military register. Low births, constant deaths and mass emigration are hollowing out Ukraine. This, more than anything, may end up being Putin’s lasting victory. The UN predicts that Ukraine’s pre-war population of 40 million could fall to 15 million by the end of this century.

Life here is burdened not only by war, but by soaring prices. The cost of living has quadrupled in three years. Many Ukrainians now spend their entire paychecks on food and utilities. Cities have grown poorer. The potholes in the roads are deeper, the paint on the buildings has faded. At least 65 per cent of Ukraine’s total state budget is directed towards the war effort, leaving little room for recovery or growth.

On Monday, I’m heading further east, to embattled Pokrovsk. Russian forces haven’t managed to take the city, but the offensive continues. I plan to speak with the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there.

There’s a saying here: the outcome of this war will be decided not by politicians in Washington, but by the Ukrainian infantry. My job is to listen to what they have to say – about the war, the ceasefire and if they want to keep fighting at all – and bring it back to you.

Until we meet again,

Svitlana

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