By Kim BarkerVisuals by Brendan Hoffman

Kim Barker, a veteran war correspondent, has been covering the conflict in Ukraine since 2024. Brendan Hoffman is a Kyiv-based photographer.

March 9, 2026

President Volodymyr Zelensky, with tired eyes, deep worry lines and a beard flecked with gray, boarded a train on Thursday night in Kyiv to visit his troops in eastern Ukraine, where the fighting has been fiercest. It seemed a lonely journey.

The U.S.-Israeli war launched against Iran almost a week earlier had pulled the world’s attention away from Ukraine’s bloody war with Russia and delayed the next round of American-backed peace talks. Supplies of air-defense missiles that Ukraine desperately would like for itself were being quickly consumed in the Middle East. At home, Ukrainians were increasingly exhausted after a cruel winter of Russian strikes.

Mr. Zelensky, now leading Ukraine into the fifth year of this war, has made a habit of visiting soldiers near the front lines every month or two, even though his security detail hates these trips. Mr. Zelensky said he found them inspiring.

“I’m here for the morale level of officers and soldiers,” Mr. Zelensky told me on Friday as we sat on a park bench in the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region. Mr. Zelensky had invited The New York Times to join him on his trip east and spoke to me and Brendan Hoffman, one of our photographers, in a series of conversations that lasted about 90 minutes in all.

Mr. Zelensky said he wanted to go to Donetsk specifically because Russia is pushing Ukraine to give away the entire region as part of any peace deal, even the chunk that Ukraine still controls. It remains the biggest sticking point in the talks.

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In his dance with a Trump administration eager to end the war and take credit, Mr. Zelensky has offered compromises. By going to Donetsk, he was strongly indicating that Ukraine did not plan to walk away from this territory.

“It’s not about kilometers, it is about people,” he said. “You see, the city’s alive.”

Mr. Zelensky gestured at the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag flying nearby, at joggers, at a confused man whose walk in the park had been interrupted by the military-like arrival of the president’s convoy.

Billboards in the city advertise hot dogs and hamburgers. People ride bikes and walk dogs. Grocery stores are open. Nearly 200,000 people live in the parts of the Donetsk region held by Ukraine, an area slightly larger than the state of Delaware.

Even if the United States is distracted by another Middle Eastern war, and even if that war makes it harder to get the weapons it needs, Mr. Zelensky knows that Ukraine must still live and still fight. The front line is no more than 10 miles from Kramatorsk, close enough that Russian drone pilots have been able to target the city with nimble drones for almost six months.

As we sat on the park bench, an end to a war that has already killed more than 15,000 civilians and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers seemed very far away.

Our conversation was interrupted by sleet and an air-raid alert, as well. The second talk took place over a lunch of beet-and-horseradish salad, mashed potatoes and chicken cutlets in a hidden underground command post that smelled like pine trees. The third happened on the train ride back to Kyiv, the country’s capital.

Mr. Zelensky’s voice was slightly scratchy, and he occasionally coughed. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian leader looked almost boyish as he gave nightly speeches from a bunker, refusing offers by Western allies to evacuate him. Now he looks all of his 48 years.

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In our conversations, he repeatedly made two points: that his country was willing to use its battle-tested expertise and technology to help American allies in the Middle East, but that Ukraine also needed more help fighting off Russia.

He said he had sent Ukrainian-made interceptor drones and drone experts to help defend U.S. military bases in Jordan. He said that more experts would go to the Middle East to advise other countries on fighting the Iranian drones known as Shaheds, which Russia has used for years against Ukraine.

Now that they, too, are the target of Shaheds, Persian Gulf countries have been firing off costly Patriot interceptor missiles at a ferocious pace. It’s the equivalent of using a bazooka to kill a fly.

Ukraine needs Patriots to defend against the ballistic missiles that Russia sends into Ukrainian cities nearly every day. Perhaps they could be traded for Ukraine’s interceptor drones, Mr. Zelensky said.

To go from Kyiv to the front and back took almost 27 hours. After a train ride of more than eight hours to a station near the eastern city of Kharkiv, Mr. Zelensky’s convoy of vans, SUVs and trucks drove a couple of hours to the Donetsk region along roads covered in netting intended to protect vehicles from strikes by light attack drones.

The vehicles raced past villages with destroyed churches and boarded-up houses at speeds that sometimes reached more than 90 miles an hour. Ruined factories resembled bent Erector sets. Trucks and even a yellow construction excavator had been outfitted with makeshift drone-shielding cages on top and electronic jammers.

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During our trip, Mr. Zelensky first visited soldiers in Druzhkivka, a frontline city with near-daily Russian shelling. His team said it was too dangerous for Brendan and me to go there, so we were taken to breakfast in nearby Sloviansk.

Later, as the Ukrainian leader sat through a briefing inside an underground bunker, a Russian guided bomb hit in the distance. Then a first-person-view drone flew above the waiting convoy of vehicles. The driver of the vehicle that Brendan and I were in reversed quickly to put distance between the vehicles. It was unclear whether the drone was Russian or Ukrainian.

Mr. Zelensky and his commander in chief had debated traveling instead to the neighboring Zaporizhzhia region. Ukrainian troops recaptured enough land there in February that Ukraine, for the first time since November 2023, gained more territory overall than Russia.

That trip would have been something of a celebration. But in Donetsk, Russia and Ukraine have fought over every foot of this most bitterly contested land.

At military command posts, the Ukrainian president handed out medals to soldiers, some of whom had been fighting for 12 years, ever since Russia started a proxy war in the east. He shook hands with commanders and listened as they made their pitches for more money, more equipment, more men. Just more.

“We’re in the very, yes, very intensive, challenging direction, the east,” Mr. Zelensky acknowledged. “They need a lot of things. And each day needs are changing.”

Throughout the day, Mr. Zelensky mainlined coffee. One adviser estimated that the president downed 10 or more cups a day.

“No, no,” Mr. Zelensky said when offered water at night. “I will drink coffee.”

He traded jokes with the commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, about how little sleep each man survives on. Mr. Zelensky said he got an average five hours a night. Mr. Syrskyi claimed to get three and a half. Mr. Zelensky said that Mr. Syrskyi, in fact, was sleeping only from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. every day.

I asked Mr. Zelensky if he had seen President Trump’s comments to Politico on Thursday. Mr. Trump had again said that Mr. Zelensky was the real obstacle to reaching peace and that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was ready to make a deal, despite much evidence to the contrary.

Mr. Zelensky shrugged it off. He is always careful when talking about Mr. Trump. Mr. Zelensky gave a short laugh at the notion of even having to explain the war’s roots. “I thought that it’s so understandable who is the aggressor and who is not,” he said.

He said he had heard different messages from Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. He credited them with working hard to get a deal done.

Another round of peace talks involving Ukraine, Russia and the United States was supposed to have been held in the United Arab Emirates on Friday, the very day Mr. Zelensky traveled out east. The Americans offered alternatives involving just Ukraine and Russia, Mr. Zelensky said, but he wanted to wait until another trilateral round could be held.

“I think that it’ll be next week, if we’re serious to continue these negotiations,” Mr. Zelensky said.

The war with Iran does not just risk shifting American attention from Ukraine. Each Patriot interceptor that Middle Eastern countries have fired is also a reminder of how few there are left in the world.

Mr. Zelensky said it was understandable that those countries had used so many Patriots, given the scale of Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

“It was a big attack, yes, and like we had all this winter,” he said. He laughed ruefully. Russian strikes have been relentless this winter.

Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine did not have many Patriots left. What will it do if it cannot get more?

“Very difficult question,” he said.

A string of Middle Eastern leaders, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, have called him, he said. Everyone wanted Ukraine’s interceptor drones. Mr. Zelensky said he would do what he could.

Our train pulled into the station at 1:30 a.m. Saturday. By this point, Kyiv had been under an air-raid alert for about 40 minutes. Mr. Zelensky’s vehicle peeled out of the train station as Patriot interceptors boomed in the distance.

That night, the Russians would fire 480 drones and 29 missiles into Ukrainian cities, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Ukraine managed to knock down 453 drones and 19 missiles.

Six people were injured in Kramatorsk, including three children, by an aerial bomb. A missile killed 10 people in Kharkiv, including a boy who was in second grade and a girl in eighth grade. Their mothers died alongside them.

Maria Varenikova and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.|

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