Kyiv, Ukraine – Thread-thin, glistening in the sun and kilometres long, optical fibres wind through the branches of trees on the frontlines of eastern Ukraine.
The cords were – sometimes still are – attached to Russian drones, making them immune to radio-electronic jamming.
The drones may have been shot down. Some are still operational, waylaid and replete with danger.
“When somebody is passing by, they just fly up and attack,” Oleh, a military officer deployed in eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
“That’s why if you see [the fibres], you’d better break them the hell up to protect yourself.”
He and his military unit are a hemisphere away from United States President Donald Trump and his peace plan to end the Russian-Ukraine war that has foundered under the weight of Moscow’s growing list of conditions.
A ceasefire seems a distant prospect with talks between US negotiators and Ukrainian and Russian officials yielding no tangible results.
“We pinned some hopes on Trump initially,” Oleh said. “But when nothing happens for the first, second, third time, we just stop paying attention.”
Oleh worries less about the talks and more about a functioning water heater in his quarters, a chance to see his wife in Kyiv and the new drone operators in his unit whose numbers have dwindled.
After more than three years of Ukraine’s gradual losses of territory and devastating losses of manpower, mostly in the eastern region of Donbas, very few Ukrainian men volunteer to fight.
Those who are conscripted undergo a brief training programme and are thrown onto the front lines as stormtroopers, whose chances of survival are low.
“I have an order to recruit people, but I don’t know where to find them,” he said. “I need people who are at least a bit motivated, who know where they’re going, who understand that they can be rounded up on the street to become a stormtrooper but choose to come here instead.”
Some potential soldiers think ahead and master wartime skills that would help them survive – but their numbers have gone down as Trump’s loud yet fruitless promises of peace have a dispiriting effect.
“We’ve got very few civilian students,” Andriy Pronin, one of the pioneers of drone warfare in Ukraine who runs a school for aspiring drone operators in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera. “Everybody thinks the war is going to be over soon.”
Most of his cadets these days are seasoned servicemen, he added.
Many such servicemen feel betrayed when they find out about yet another concession Russia has got from Trump.
“We’re like a devoted wife. We’re the last to find out about the husband’s infidelities,” Ihor, a military officer in the Black Sea port of Odesa, told Al Jazeera.
Odesa is dangerously close to the occupied part of the southern region of Kherson and the annexed Crimean Peninsula, from which Russian drones and missiles attack the city almost every day and night.
“What we hear [about the peace talks] is nothing but rumours,” he said.
Last week, Trump imposed tariffs on 185 nations – but excluded Russia and its closest allies, Belarus and North Korea.
The White House also lifted sanctions on Kirill Dmitriev, one of the Kremlin’s key negotiators on Ukraine, who visited the White House last week for two days of below-the-radar talks.
Kyiv-born and US-educated, Dmitriev manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and is reportedly connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to the Reuters news agency, Dmitriev’s wife, Natalya Popova, is a “deputy to Katerina Tikhonova, one of Putin’s daughters, at a foundation which works with Moscow State University where they both studied”.
In televised remarks broadcast on Sunday, Dmitriev complained that there is “still a large number of Russia’s enemies in the US government” and decried a “total disinformation” campaign that excludes Moscow’s viewpoint.
Halyna Vanytina has firsthand knowledge of Russia’s “point of view”.
A Russian drone crashed into an apartment building in her neighbourhood in the northeastern city of Kharkiv on Thursday, killing a 12-year-old girl, her parents and neighbour and wounding 34 more people.
The explosion’s shockwave shattered windows in hundreds of apartments nearby – including Vanytina’s.
“Trump and Ukraine live in different universes,” she told Al Jazeera. “He talks about friendship with [Putin] while we go to bed dressed and keep our documents in fireproof boxes.”
Russian forces have been repelled several times in their attempts to seize Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which sits only 40km (25 miles) away from the border with Russia and is vulnerable to daily shelling.
‘No lull ahead, no ceasefire’
To a Ukrainian political analyst-turned-serviceman, the failure to negotiate a Trump-proposed ceasefire is linked to Putin’s idee fixe to grab as much Ukrainian land as possible for a domestic public relations triumph.
Putin wants to continue a ground offensive until the autumn, hoping to break through Ukrainian defences, so Putin can claim the “title of a great conqueror and the gatherer of [Russian] lands”, Kirill Sazonov wrote on Telegram on Monday.
“So, we have no lull ahead, no ceasefire with a gradual transition to stable peace,” he wrote. “But we will withstand the way we did in 2022.”
Another serviceman deployed in the Donbas region said that after half a dozen contusions and stints in hospitals, he has nothing but determination and black humour left.
Mykola, a 38-year-old civil engineer who spent two years in the trenches, said he does not want to see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dressed down by Trump and forced to sign away Ukraine’s natural riches.
The only way to prove Ukraine’s resilience is to keep targeting advancing Russians, he said.
“There is going to be a lot of fieldwork,” he told Al Jazeera.
