Defiance and denial in besieged Sloviansk as residents resist surrender to Moscow

With Trump pressing Kyiv to give up the last part of the Donbas, citizens of this northern city remain determined to face down Russian occupation, reports Isabel Coles in Sloviansk

- Isabel Coles

As darkness falls over their home in eastern Ukraine, Viktoria Mylenko and her nine-year-old son, Oleksandr, brace themselves for the night ahead.

For weeks now, they have been torn from sleep by the buzz of Russian drones and the crash of heavy glide bombs. Most nights they jump out of bed and squeeze into the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, where the walls are thickest, waiting for the threat to pass.

Mylenko, whose blond hair frames careworn features, is not sure how much more of this she can take. Deep down, the 51-year-old knows she should already have left Sloviansk along with her parents, who live with her and their pet chihuahua. The city she calls home is in the eastern region that Donald Trump is pressing Ukraine to surrender to Russia in exchange for peace. Vladimir Putin has vowed to take all of the Donbas region one way or another.

"Right now we don't even want to think about it," said Mylenko, sitting at her kitchen table. "Our home is here. We don't want to give it to Russia."

The land-for-peace deal poses fundamental questions for Ukrainians: are they willing to make painful sacrifices to bring the war to an end? Even if they give up Donbas, do they believe Putin would stop there?

Nowhere are those questions more stark than in the last part of Donbas still under Ukrainian control. After more than a decade of war, Russia has occupied almost 90% of the region, made up of the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Some 200,000 people live in the remaining pocket, including the cities of Kostiantynivka, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which are known as Ukraine's fortress belt.