In those early days, as Moscow’s tanks and troops trundled into Ukraine, Mykolaiv had become a critical target, representing the only obstacle that stood in the way of the Russian advance on the grand strategic and economic prize that is the nearby port city of Odesa.
In the wake of the fierce battles during which Mykolaiv’s defenders repulsed Russian forces, it was given the honorary title of “Hero City of Ukraine” for its outstanding courage and resistance at the time.
Since then, the city’s governor and head of the military administration, Vitaliy Kim, has often been credited as one of those who rallied Mykolaiv’s residents and defenders at that crucial moment.
From the very start of the war, Kim had been in the Russian crosshairs and it was only because he overslept and was delayed arriving for work one morning in March 2022 that he escaped death when Russian missiles slammed into Mykolaiv’s Regional Headquarters.
Thirty-seven other people were not so lucky and died in the onslaught, while another 34 were wounded.
Just over a week ago, following a meeting I had with Kim, he agreed to be photographed outside the ruins of what had been his previous office and headquarters.
It struck me that little had changed since my last visits, except perhaps for the existence now of a Wall
of Remembrance of the kind that can be found across Ukraine’s cities marking the ever-growing numbers of those who have fallen in battle.
Such memorials are always poignant, but perhaps never more so than now, when the sacrifices made by so many Ukrainians in defence of their freedom and country’s sovereignty are at risk of being squandered by a US brokered “peace deal” that many feel is tantamount to appeasement of Russia’s aggression.
Wandering around the memorial just off Mykolaiv’s Soborna Square – or Grey Square as locals call it – I watched as members of one family attended the little shrine they had erected to their father, the fallen soldier’s wife openly weeping as they did so.
italiy Kim outside the building destroyed by a Russian missile of which he was a target. Picture: David Pratt
Improvised shrines
PORTRAITS of men and women in uniform or family photographs, soldiers’ dog tags hanging forlornly from tree branches, bunches of flowers, some long withered and shrivelled, are just some of the mementoes adorning these improvised shrines that grow in number daily in Mykolaiv as they do elsewhere in Ukraine.
It’s against the backdrop of these growing casualty figures that for months now US president Donald Trump and his negotiating team have been turning up the pressure to solve this war that now surpasses the length of the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” of the Second World War.
For his part, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has stuck to his maximalist demands including a full withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the eastern Donbas region.
Hard as it sometimes is to imagine, almost four years on from the Russian invasion, Putin’s forces were expected to defeat Ukraine within a matter of weeks. But as any cursory look at open-source data will confirm – despite Russian claims to the contrary – its territorial gains have been limited.
Russia only controls roughly 19% of Ukraine, including territories occupied in 2014. During 2025, Russian forces have taken roughly 3,000 square km, but most gains are scattered, operationally insignificant, and achieved at a phenomenally high human cost.
This issue of territory remains perhaps the most intractable, as Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff travels to Germany this weekend to meet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders for the latest round of high-level talks on ending the war.
It was three weeks ago now that Team Trump sent the first of two shockwaves across Europe with a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that many of Kyiv’s allies said was little more than a reiteration of Russia’s own demands.
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In short, Moscow and Washington both demanded that Kyiv’s forces withdraw from roughly a quarter of Donetsk province and a sliver of neighbouring Luhansk province still under Ukrainian control.
Donetsk and Luhansk provinces together form what is known locally as the Donbas – a sprawling eastern steppe roughly half the size of England.
It’s an area of great political importance to Kyiv providing as it does its most heavily fortified bulwark against Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
As Christopher Miller, the Financial Times Ukraine correspondent, recently reminded, it was once the Soviet Union’s industrial powerhouse and is also “home to a complex mix of ideologies and languages with a blend of Russian and Ukrainian called surzhyk common there today”.
A poignant memorial garden in Mykolaiv. Picture: David Prat
Donbas control
PUT quite simply, the Donbas and who controls it remains as contentious now as it’s ever been.
As a reporter back in 2014, I covered what was the beginning of Russia’s attempts to seize the Donbas militarily.
Since then, the Kremlin’s efforts have become bogged down and while its troops have been advancing – albeit at a snail’s pace – Russian forces have yet to seize what has been dubbed a “fortress belt” of cities including Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
These – for now – have remained a “barricade” of sorts for Ukraine against any further Russian advance and with Moscow’s failure to achieve control through military might, it is now trying to do so as part of the ongoing negotiations.
Dr Samir Puri is director of the Global Governance and Security Centre at Chatham House, and says this “remains a source of frustration for Putin, who (illegally) declared the annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk in September 2023, along with the other largely Russian-occupied regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia”.
In Donbas so far, says Puri, Putin “has been unable to align his words with corresponding military deeds”.
Since Trump’s first controversial 28-point peace plan earlier this month, Ukraine’s leaders have since responded with a counterproposal.
According to descriptions of the plan by European leaders and diplomats, and accounts from officials who have seen or been briefed on the plan, Kyiv has insisted on legal guarantees of protection against future Russian aggression and assurances that Ukraine would hold on to land it currently controls.
That 28-point plan is now a 20-point one and, according to The New York Times, is part of a Ukrainian attempt to stymie Trump’s demand that Ukraine secure peace by relinquishing more land than Russia now occupies.
Had Trump’s original plan gone ahead it would have effectively rewarded Russia for its aggression, insist Ukraine and its European allies.
According to the NYT, Zelenskyy, in a news briefing, said the Ukrainian proposal now under discussion “consists of three documents, including one that lays out plans for rebuilding parts of the country that have been reduced to rubble and another that would commit the United States and European nations to come to Ukraine’s aid if it were attacked again”.
In a social media post on Thursday, Zelenskyy added that it would be critical to ensure that the guarantees are rigorous enough to prevent a future Russian invasion. He said it needed to be more robust than a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, which only provided Ukraine security “assurances” in return for giving up its inherited nuclear weapons. Russia, which had also signed the memorandum, violated it when it seized Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
But if Trump’s original 28-point plan “peace” plan was the first shockwave to hit Ukraine and its allies, then another followed last week.
It came in the shape of the publication of the US National Security Strategy (NSS ) document, which according to Trump is a “roadmap” to ensure that America remains “the greatest and most successful nation in human history”.
A Mykolaiv family remember a loved one fallen in battle. Picture: David Pratt
‘America First’
LAYING out Trump’s vision of the world and how he will use US military and economic power to work towards his “America First” agenda, the 33-page NSS was received in Europe as little more than a kick in the teeth for those who have centred the US-Europe relationship and commitment to democratic values at the heart of collective security arrangements.
As Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America programme at the international affairs think tank Chatham House observed, it’s all a far cry from the last Trump strategy document back in 2017 which identified great power competition with Russia and China as the most pressing US foreign policy challenge. Instead, as the headline on the Chatham House article summed it up, it’s now all about “cutting deals, hammering Europe and treading gently around autocrats”.
Coinciding as the NSS release did with my latest trip to Ukraine, it was impossible to ignore the response of many commentators in the country.
Bohdan Nahaylo is chief editor of the Kyiv Post and, like many in Ukraine, takes a dim view of Trump’s latest moves, pulling no punches in his column on Friday. “Here is what Trump has actually done: he has rigged the game. Rather than stand with the victim of aggression and uphold rules that protect all nations, he backs the cheat and the bully… call it what you will, but it is not diplomacy. It is capitulation dressed up in a suit and hiding behind a false suntan,” Nahaylo concluded, echoing the sentiments of many Ukrainians.
In terms of the NSS, Nahaylo sees “Trump’s patronising disregard for America’s allies as “despicable” and having “consequences that outlast his presidency”.
Some commentators, however, caution on reading too much into the contents of the NSS document given that any security strategy is about as much a public messaging exercise as anything else. But as global crises – not least in Ukraine – have often shown, events have a nasty habit of quickly overtaking what is detailed in such documents.
In Ukraine’s case, even though Trump’s NSS does endorse Ukraine’s “survival as a viable state”, it says nothing about returning Ukraine to its international borders, maintaining its democracy or receiving security guarantees.
As it stands the NSS simply calls for “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to… re-establish strategic stability with Russia”.
Just what that means exactly is anybody’s guess, but it’s worth noting that the Kremlin appeared pleased with the details contained in the NSS.
Russian spokesperson Dmitry Peskov welcomed its content as a “positive step” and “largely consistent with Russia’s vision”.
As for Ukraine specifically, reports continue to circulate that Trump is determined to impose a deal by Christmas, though many say this is exaggerated.
What’s in no doubt, though, is that Ukraine is caught in what Kyiv Post editor Nahaylo calls an “impossible vice”. “On one side is Russian imperialism in its most savage form, with war crimes, mass graves, and the attempted erasure of Ukrainian identity,” explains Nahaylo.
“On the other side is Trump’s… increasingly explicit demands that Ukraine surrender its sovereignty to satisfy his ego and end a war that has become inconvenient for his political narrative… he pressures allies and friends of Ukraine to let him call all the shoddy shots.”
Frozen assets
ONE European diplomat described the latest US demands as a “classic Trump psyop”, with one Wall Street Journal report noting that American officials have fed European counterparts secret proposals for sweeping business deals with Russia, financed, in part, with billions in frozen Russian assets that Europe wants to use to keep Ukraine’s government solvent.
Amid fears the Trump administration might seek control of the Russian funds and use them in a future settlement with Moscow to end the war, the EU this weekend agreed to indefinitely freeze Russian central bank assets held in Europe, removing a big obstacle to using the cash to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia.
In turn, Russia’s central bank has filed a lawsuit in Moscow seeking damages from Brussels-based depository Euroclear for freezing its sovereign assets and vowed to challenge European plans to immobilise the reserves.
This weekend, the wrangling and search for a peace deal continues in Berlin as US special envoy Witkoff meets Zelenskyy along with UK, French and German leaders. Few, however, believe there will be any major breakthrough, as Ukraine faces the grim prospect of a continuing war. Should that prove to be the case, then those shrines to the fallen in Mykolaiv and other Ukrainian cities, will continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future.
