The city of Sloviansk, prewar population just over 100,00, sits smack in the middle of the territory Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will discuss “swapping” when they meet on Friday in Alaska—the first U.S.-Russia summit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow and Kyiv have been fighting over Sloviansk more or less nonstop for more than 11 years, since Russian proxies first tried to take over the Donetsk province in 2014. With one exception—three months in spring 2014—the city has remained in Ukrainian hands.
Now, as world leaders talk over Ukrainians’ heads about giving up Sloviansk without another shot fired, I sat down with two soldiers who have been defending the city for over a year. Vlad Huma, 38, and Hlib Velitchenko, 32, say a swap of the kind Putin has proposed is unthinkable. But they know the conversation won’t end there, and they are girding for the worst.
Sloviansk is one of four front-line cities that make up what the Institute for the Study of War calls Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” a north-south defensive line some 300 miles east of Kyiv. After more than a decade of fighting, the line is heavily fortified—one of the most effective bulwarks holding off the Russian advance. In the last three and a half years of all-out war, both sides have lost thousands of men—tens of thousands of Ukrainians, hundreds of thousands of Russians—with little change on the ground. In the year Huma and Velitchenko have spent in Sloviansk, the front has shifted just 3.2 miles west. “We measure it in meters, not kilometers,” Huma explained.
At that rate, it would take the Russians more than a decade to conquer the territory Putin is asking Trump to give him in exchange for a ceasefire. The so-called swap—it’s not clear what territory Russia is being asked to give up—would also put the Kremlin in a much better position to take the rest of Ukraine, starting with the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk provinces just to the west, which would be left relatively defenseless once Moscow controlled the fortress belt.
Years of fighting have transformed the region around Sloviansk. Thousands of Ukrainian fighters live garrisoned in the half-destroyed villages scattered around the city, mostly in modest houses with well-tended gardens and old fruit trees now abandoned by the people who once lived there. The city itself is a bustling logistical hub, filled with men in fatigues and the businesses that support them—barbers, garages, military clothing shops, construction supply stores, and cafes. (There is no alcohol for sale anywhere along the fortress belt.)
Population estimates vary widely, and the residents who remain are deeply tired of the war. Although there has been no fighting in the streets since 2014, Sloviansk is the target of constant shelling, including by deadly Russian glide bombs that can take out an entire house.
According to a June survey by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology, some 56 percent of the region’s residents—compared to 43 percent of Ukrainians nationwide—could accept de facto recognition of Russian control of the territory Moscow has already seized. “But that’s completely different from giving up territory Moscow hasn’t conquered yet,” institute executive director Anton Hrushetskyi explains. And although eastern Ukraine was once more Russia-friendly than the rest of the country, that has changed dramatically since 2022. According to the most recent polling, in October 2024, 88 percent of residents now have a “bad” or “very bad” opinion of Russia.
Huma and Velitchenko are part of an elite drone unit that works out of Sloviansk, defending the front and supporting soldiers on the ground some 20 miles to the east. No fighter in their battalion—mostly drone pilots and IT technicians—has been killed in the year since the two men joined. But the unit has sustained more serious injuries than they care to count, and the brigade they support has lost a large number of men. “You can’t fight an infantry war without dead soldiers,” explains Velitchenko, a rail thin man with a bushy Cossack mustache who worked for an IT firm before enlisting in the armed forces. “We have already paid for this territory—with the lives we lost defending it.”
Neither Huma nor Velitchenko think it’s likely that Ukraine will give up the Donetsk province. “That’s against the constitution,” says Huma, a beefy man with a buzz cut and a scarred right eye. “It’s not going to happen.” But they fear the PR damage could be almost as bad. “Putin wants to make us look like the obstacle to peace,” Huma explains. “He’s setting a condition he knows we can’t meet, so we come off as the bad guy determined to prolong the war.”
Both men have a deeply cynical view of Trump as someone driven exclusively by money and self-regard. “When money rules,” Huma says, “lives are cheap—especially Ukrainian lives.” When I ask what recourse Ukraine will have if Trump insists on a swap, they remind me of a scene caught on video in autumn 2019, well before the full-scale invasion. Velitchenko whips out his phone and finds the clip, which went viral at the time on social media, provoking a bitter national debate.
A young-looking, clean-shaven Zelensky visits an armed unit in the town of Zolote, some 40 miles east of Sloviansk and now occupied by Russian troops. The newly elected president is insisting the Ukrainians retreat from what was then still a contested flashpoint on the front line between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists. But the uniformed men refuse, and a nasty quarrel ensues.
“Ukrainians will go on fighting one way or another,” Huma explains, “with or without the U.S.” Compared to the American army, he says, “we aren’t well equipped. We don’t have everything we need to win. But we’re very good at stretching what we have—and we will fight to the last Ukrainian.”
“You don’t understand,” Velitchenko broke in. “You don’t understand what’s at stake. No, we don’t want to give up this land where we’ve fought for a year and watched our comrades fall.” But for him, he says, it’s not about territory. “I don’t want to live in a world without rules—where someone can break into my house just because he has a gun.” Both Putin and Trump, Velitchenko believes, thrive in a world without rules. But he can’t live like that. “That’s what I’m fighting for,” he tells me.
Bottom line for both men: they can’t imagine taking what they call a “pause” in the fighting, especially not under pressure from a careless, fickle American president. “If we give up now,” Huma explains, “we’ll just make it easier for the enemy in the next round—and make no mistake, there will be a next round. It’s either me now or my children in a few years—fighting a stronger Russia with a big advantage on the ground. I’d rather finish it now.”
The post Ukrainian Fighters Aren’t Expecting Much from the Trump-Putin Summit appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Continue reading...