What price will Ukraine have to pay for peace? – podcast | Ukraine

Anton Levsiushkin grew up in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine. It is a seaside city. “Swimming, windsurfing, kitsesurfing”, he tells Helen Pidd, “anything a human being can do in water, we did it”.

Sofiia Rozhdestvina is from a little further north, in Donetsk. It’s a place, she explains, famed for its roses and its football club, Shakhtar Donetsk. Her family had their surname inscribed on a few of the stadium seats.

Neither Anton nor Sofiia have been able to live in their homes – and the wider Donbas region – since Russia began to occupy parts of Ukraine in 2014. But both had long hoped some day to return, even once Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

This week, however, the prospect looks further away than ever. As diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour explains, a pair of historic summits organised by US President Donald Trump – first with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and then with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, flanked by his European allies – has brought the possibility of an end to the fighting in Ukraine closer.

But there is a heavy price for Ukraine to pay for peace. Putin wants the whole of the Donbas region under his control – including the millions of people who live there – and Trump might be willing to support him.

So is the three-year war in Ukraine close to an end? And what will it mean to Ukrainians like Anton and Sofiia if it is?

The leaders of major European countries alongside US president Trump
Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
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