Kyiv, Ukraine

President Volodymyr Zelensky receives me in a secure basement. It’s Wednesday, Feb. 26, two days before his White House meeting. How does he feel? “Good. But nothing is decided. I still don’t know what President Trump wants or if I will really make this trip.”

Because he doesn’t trust him? Because he doesn’t believe in the goodwill of an ally who called him a “dictator”? Mr. Zelensky bursts out laughing. “No. The problem is, above all, that I don’t know why he is doing this. Doesn’t he understand that Putin is unreliable and that . . .” He hesitates. “At the same time, fortunately, there is the Senate and the House. It’s on them. I rely on their bipartisan support, and the overwhelming strong public opinion. Like two years ago, remember? When Congress asked questions, listened to our answers, and ended up unlocking the military aid package we had been waiting on for months.”

I raise the worst-case scenario: Could Ukraine continue without America? “It would be difficult,” Mr. Zelensky says. “They have the technology. The intelligence. Suppose Germany, for example, agrees to deliver Patriots to us—they would need American authorization.” And Europe? Doesn’t he believe in a European alternative? “Yes, of course. I believe in Immanuel, for example.” He means French President Emmanuel Macron, but he pronounces it with an initial “ee” sound, as if it were spelled with an I. In his accent is a tone of true camaraderie. “If this Washington meeting happens, it will be thanks to him, Immanuel. I thank him for that; he is a true friend; and also. . . . Do you know that he is a military expert? He knows, from a distance, the smallest detail regarding our front line.”

Speaking of the front line, does Mr. Zelensky know that I am soon leaving for Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region? If he signs the agreement with Mr. Trump, does it still make sense for me to go? He doesn’t hesitate: “Of course. Your presence will please the soldiers. It will warm their hearts. And for that matter . . .” He seems to think aloud. “I think I’m going to do it, this trip. I’m not sure of anything, but that, I’m going to do.”

***

I feel as if it happened suddenly. I hadn’t been back to the front line for eight months. I realize that the drone war has truly replaced trench warfare. We are in a command center on the outskirts of Pokrovsk, an eastern stronghold where the Russians are throwing all their forces to break through. In an underground bunker, a former factory, a dozen Ukrainian soldier-geeks sit in front of a wall of computers. Some are barefaced. Others, in sweat shirts and balaclavas, communicate via microphone with men whose voices alone can be heard as they operate reconnaissance and attack drones.

Suddenly, on one of the screens, three silhouettes appear, walking in a snowy landscape scattered with sparse, aligned trees. Silence falls in the bunker. The man in the balaclava selects one of the silhouettes, at random, with his mouse. Follows it. Loses it. Zooms in on the image. Finds it again. Transmits the coordinates. The silhouette disappears in a cloud of gray, poorly pixelated snow. But the cloud dissipates. And it reappears, getting up, staggering. Is he wounded? Just dazed by the impact? The other two silhouettes join it. They continue, also stumbling, toward a denser cluster of trees.

The man in the balaclava gives a new order into his microphone. The first silhouette collapses for good in a brief convulsion, while the other two huddle between the birch trees. An hour passes. “They will freeze and die there,” the man in the balaclava says. When they attempt an escape, he takes his time, follows them, whispers one last order. When the smoke clears, two motionless shapes remain, resembling felled trees.

***

When the hunter becomes the hunted, there aren’t 36 ways to escape. To escape conventional drones, one must be equipped with conical antennas placed on the roof of the car, jamming communication between the drone and its pilot, as we were. But for drones connected to their pilot by a miles-long fiber-optic cable—which form much of the Russian arsenal—there is no other solution than to drive without stopping, at full speed, on icy tracks made almost invisible by the snow; then, on arrival, to run for cover into a posadka, one of these peculiar forests without undergrowth, just slender, almost bare alders, planted during Soviet times to hold the rich black soils of Donbas against violent winds.

Here there aren’t three lost Russian soldiers but 50 miners from the closed Pokrovsk mine who have eight days and eight nights to set up one of these fortifications, made of excavated and raised earth, buried metal nets, craters dug in the snow, or cones. A ballet of miners turned into lumberjacks. A shuttle of felled trees, cut as far away as possible with an electric saw, then carried on men’s backs. A cluster of thicker trunks where we take shelter when a drone hums. We sit around a fire fed by chips cut with an ax from the logs. Witnessing the ingenuity of the Ukrainians, I can’t help but think of those Russians sent to slaughter like cannon fodder.

***

Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, hasn’t changed since our last meeting, eight months ago, on the Kharkiv front. He has high, lean cheekbones and slightly slanted, laughing eyes, barely visible as they are sunk into their emaciated sockets, and the bearing of a silent centurion. He avoids interviews and feels comfortable only here, in the improvised and icy command tent near Pokrovsk where he has summoned me.

The victor of the Battle of Kyiv, then liberator of Izyum, in the Kharkiv region, Mr. Syrskyi has a reputation as a tough officer, not sparing of his troops’ lives. What always strikes me is his gruff fraternity and camaraderie with his men; his way, when they wait for him, like today, in 15-degree weather, frozen in a statuesque salute, of ordering them to come immediately to take shelter with him; his tendency to move from outpost to outpost, never far from the battlefield. As always, he gives me an update on his needs—today, if the Americans withdraw, Franco-Italian SAMP-T missiles.

Then, as usual, a message to Mr. Macron: “It’s good, our pilots are trained, and your Mirage jets are, since this morning, precisely this morning, operational and in the sky.” He bursts into a great laugh that narrows his gaze even further—he can’t tell me more, but to Western defeatists who believe Ukraine is on its knees, he has a surprise in store. The last time I heard him speak and laugh like this was a few days before his lightning offensive into the Kursk region of Russia.

***

Oksana Ribaniak is 21. She is slight, frail. But with her childlike physique and long red hair braided into a ponytail, she is the commander of an otherwise all-male drone unit that is helping the infantry block the Russian offensive on Pokrovsk.

“I have been at war for three years,” she says. “I commanded an artillery unit, I was seriously wounded, and I now command this drone unit—but, deep down I am a poet.” She has two collections ready to go to print, delayed only by the war. Is there another country besides that of Taras Shevchenko (1814-61) where a war leader would say something like that?

She suddenly lowers her voice, looks away. Her large, implacable green eyes have filled with tears, and her pretty mouth tightens into a half-smile. She had a fiancé, Maksym Emets. He was a poet, too. They met through work. They envisioned a future together. But he died in combat a few weeks ago. And she now has only one purpose, or rather two: the defense of Ukraine and the defense of Maksym’s work.

***

What is left to say about the Anne of Kyiv Brigade, created in 2024, equipped by France, trained by France, and named by Messrs. Zelensky and Macron during the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings after a Ukrainian princess who married King Henri I to become the queen of France from 1051 to 1060?

Desertions, corruption, disorganization—it’s all been said. And that’s why I decided to see for myself. First, I headed to the north of Pokrovsk, in the abandoned mine that serves as its headquarters. Since the beginning of 2025, a solid officer with 27 years of experience, a veteran of the terrible battles of Sumy, has reigned. He says simply, “The brigade wasn’t missing much—maybe a conductor. Let’s say I was that. It wasn’t rocket science.”

Then, farther south and closer to the front, among the ranks of a reconnaissance unit consisting of four men, a dog and a brand-new Renault VAB, tasked with identifying, in the vast white expanse of this desperately flat terrain, a posadka where night and next-day drone operators can ambush.

“All this controversy was very unfair,” says the unit leader, whom I know only by his first name, Dmytro. “You are in the hottest zone of the front. How could anyone expect us to adapt instantly? We are men, not North Koreans.” In the meantime, he has found the perfect posadka. He parks the vehicle and shows me how, when drones fly in formation under a bright blue sky, they can be shot down with a machine gun.

The great pride of the Anne of Kyiv Brigade is its Caesar self-propelled guns, which are ultramobile, mounted on wheels, precise and effective. We are on an inspection mission with the brigade’s commander, Taras Maksymov. We drive for about an hour on icy dirt roads in an ordinary car, without armor or jamming systems, because the Russians are so close. We arrive not in a posadka, but in a crater dug deep enough that only the cannon’s muzzle appears—and barely—under camouflage nets as white as the snow.

The men are waiting for us. There are six of them. They pass time by smoking cigarettes and reciting poems to each other.

Attention. Shell in the breech. Loading the white powder bag. Calculating air pressure and wind speed. Everything is ready? Is the reconnaissance drone in place? Fire! We wait a minute or two to debrief the drone and ensure the Russian position on the other side has been destroyed.

As the cannon, now identified by the enemy, moves out to a new position a few kilometers away, we leave as well, hurrying off among the dry, bare branches that catch on our clothes and scratch our faces. The Anne of Kyiv Brigade hasn’t always lived up to the legend that preceded it. But it hasn’t lost a single one of the 18 Caesar guns France delivered to it.

***

This scene should have gone earlier in the story, but I recount things as they come to me. We are near Pokrovsk, in a gigantic hangar transformed into a repair workshop for tanks and other vehicles. Pale light. Carcasses of rusted scrap metal. Half-destroyed or simply dismantled machines. Mechanics with grease-covered gloves work, experts in examining a remnant of an engine, an intact armor plate or a still usable steel rivet. Then, everything stops.

At both ends of the hangar, computers have been set up so the men can watch, live, the globally broadcast conversation between Mr. Trump and their president. At first when Mr. Zelensky speaks, the tank surgeons are pleased because they feel he is in control, a good messenger of their suffering and heroism.

Then, JD Vance and Mr. Trump drown out Mr. Zelensky’s voice and insult him. The men in Pokrovsk say nothing. A mixture of stupefaction (such vulgarity) and dread (they, in the grease and blood, understand how indispensable foreign aid is) but also pride. This young president’s standing up to the most powerful men in the world is the image of that calm and mocking boldness, which in Ukrainian is called nakhabstvo and in Yiddish chutzpah. That pride is evident on their faces.

I don’t know if Mr. Zelensky’s allies will be able to rise to his level. I don’t know if the Americans will grasp that in Mr. Zelensky’s dignity lies their “city upon a hill” creed and that American leaders, from the Founding Fathers all the way to Kennedy and Reagan, would have been proud of a deep bond with this leader.

I don’t know, really, if any of this will be properly understood after that incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity—call it what you will—in the Oval Office. But I do know that with this blend of irony, morality, composure and disdain for human baseness, which Mr. Zelensky never abandoned for a single moment, he has again entered the legend of this century.