No hope: little future prospects for eastern Ukraine

No hope: little future prospects for eastern Ukraine

A ceasefire agreement can be a catastrophe for the Ukraine

The concerns about the ceasefire

This burning question interacts in the Ukrainian front bunkers and cities besieged in the ruins, where ubiquitous exhaustion requires peace, but a costly, learned distrust of Russia prevails.

The fears are complex. Would a ceasefire hold? Would Russia only use it to prepare themselves and attack again? Would Moscow be interested in such an agreement when it quickly gains terrain? Would the Ukraine supporters continue their military commitment in the same way if they feel that diplomacy has led to a silence of weapons?

The brutal everyday life on the front

In front of the screens of Volodymyr Sablyn, a battalion commander of the 66th mechanized Brigade, a heartbreaking story of Ukraina's modern but archaic brutal battlefield unfolds. Tiny, inexpensive drones fly over the disassembled trenches around Lyman - a mix of frozen mud, garbage, bunkers and "beets", the ugly term for non -secluded human remains.

"If there is now a ceasefire, it will only get worse for us," said Sablyn recently. "Because the enemy will regenerate, form new military units, group and attack again."

Sablyn joined the army in February 2015 when Russian separatists occupied the city of Debalt Sseve in the Oblast Donetsk despite an agreed ceasefire. On the entire Eastern Front are the ceasefire called up ten years ago, which offered little more than one cover for further Russian military progress, the lively proof of the urgent need for caution at the negotiating table.

The military situation and its risks

The place that Sablyn commands is a key to the ongoing Russian attacks and the tolerance of losses. While Sablyn's troops fire mortar grenades on Lyman's front lines, Moscow's forces move to an important military hub in the south - Pokrovsk. The pace of the circuit is terrifying and as soon as it falls, Russia will only have a few larger settlements between its armed forces and the big cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia.

Hope is an important currency here, and a facet of this is constantly addressed by Ukrainian officials is the idea that European or NATO troops could offer security guarantees for Kyiw through their specific presence in front areas-as a kind of peacekeeping.

The support of NATO

A European defense officer recently announced that there were "active discussions" about similar support. A ceasefire, followed by European NATO members who guard a demilitarized zone, is a central element of a peace plan, which was proposed by the new Ukraine Sonders' Sonders of US President Donald Trump, General Keith Kellogg.

"If NATO could send troops to Ukraine," said Sablyn, "that would be a guarantee of security in Ukraine. Because Russia - no matter how much they say that they are not afraid of anyone - is afraid of America, is afraid of NATO as a whole."

The reality of life in the war

But while the twilight lies over the front artillery units of the 66th brigade, the idea seems to have an insurmountable risk. The threat of Russian drones is so acute that artillery units can be reached as soon as the sun touches the horizon and the light disappears.

A unit commander who accompanies us checks his hand monitor to see if the Russian educational drones have disappeared. We wait 10 minutes for the "everything" signal to be given, and then sprint over the stony fields to a row of trees, where outdated artillery shooters regularly hand over "suppressive fire" to the Russians.

doubts and skepticism of the civilian population

peace is a serious concern here, and the men who live underground are skeptical. "There is only a 30 percent probability for an armistice," said a soldier, Viktor. "Because the situation on the front is not that we can imagine peace. It's all very difficult."

Another, Andriy, added: "I think it's 40%. The other side wins and conquers areas. We have nothing to say on the whole."

CNN does not name the full names of several conversation partners for security reasons.

The increasing openness of the troops, which repeated only rehearsed victory security a few months ago, is reflected in the exhausted civilians from the front cities.

Slowly through the devastated streets of Lyman drags 72-year-old Larissa, whose golden teeth shine under the shabby, beamed concrete.

"We were hit 19 times today ... 19 times in this morning," she said to CNN. "My husband counts and I take sleeping pills. And then he wakes me up and asks: 'Did you count?'" "

The desperate situation of the civilian population

she becomes tearful when she is asked why she did not leave a city that was first taken at the Russian invasion in 2022 and later did not leave Ukrainian troops. Now it is put under pressure again by Putin's men who are about 10 kilometers from the edges.

"I ran barefoot here; I swam there in the river," she says, pointing to the edges of the city. "I'm 72, I want to (don't go). All three brothers are buried here, all my aunts, uncle, my father, my mother. I can't go."

She has little sympathy for Kyiw and describes the Ukrainian soldiers who hire them in supermarkets as messy. A friend of her family, seven people strong, left Lyman two weeks ago and was housed in a stable near Poltava. "A stable! But it was clean and there was some hay."

Larissa notes that Trump will be no different from bidges she heard about that he tried to buy parts of Eastern Ukraine for his son and probably reproduces false Russian propaganda. Your hopes rest on the Kremlin as a decision -maker. "Nobody will solve this. Only Putin will do it when he says: 'This is enough, I have already killed so many people.'" "She nods when she is asked whether Putin is the only way forward.

insights into the destroyed communities

Behind her, a bus collects locals that continue to come to the bleak city to shop. Nobody speaks until the driver Dima says that after the first attack by the Russians he went to relatives to Russia and recently returned. He says he is used to the destruction and hope for peace. "It's all politics. Nothing depends on us. How it will be decided, it will be."

For others there is a decade full of turbulence and losses. Inesa, 60, sits alone on the central square of Slovyansk, where 10 years ago Russian deputy separatists conquered the local administrative building and the Ukrainian army over repeated ceasefire and Russian advances.

She said, a decade ago, despite the turmoil of separatism, they still had jobs and hope. Now she and her mother are everything that is left of Slovyansk, a key destination in Russia in Donetsk, the rest of her family is scattered through the war throughout the world.

"Now there is no future," she said. "We don't see them. Who does that? I want it to just stop. Stop the bombing."