The quiet of a Kyiv cemetery is broken by a trumpet salute, then a burst of rifle fire.

Soldiers stretch a Ukrainian flag over a shiny wooden coffin and stand silently alongside in the sparkling white snow. A woman cries, her face crumpling.

Natalia is burying her husband for the second time.

Vitaly was killed three years ago fighting in the eastern Donbas and his first grave was in their home town of Slovyansk. But Russian forces have advanced since then and the area is increasingly under attack.

So Natalia had her husband's grave exhumed and Vitaly's remains moved hundreds of miles to Ukraine's capital.

"When we buried him in Slovyansk, land was being liberated and we thought the war would soon end," Natalia explains, after the reburial ceremony conducted with military honours.

"But the frontline is constantly moving closer and I was scared Vitaly might end up under occupation."

Vitaly was a ceramics artist who volunteered to defend his country in the early days of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.

"He didn't want to, but he had do it. He was a patriot," Natalia explains, through her tears. She was pregnant when her husband was killed and he never got to meet their daughter.

The decision to move Vitaly's body from the land where he was born and fought was extremely painful.

"It was very hard, emotionally. But it was the right decision," Natalia is sure. "It would have been far harder to leave him, to know that he had stayed."

'Attacks every couple of days'

Ukrainians are facing unimaginable choices now as the US tries to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv, but Russia pushes on with its invasion.

That includes massive aerial attacks against Ukraine's energy system, against all rules of war.

Meanwhile, the most pressure for compromise is on Kyiv.

At some point, the US-led talks will hone in on the most sensitive issue of all: the status of land in the eastern Donbas region that so many men have died defending.

Ukraine still controls around a fifth of the area, including Slovyansk. But the town is close to the current frontline where Russian forces have been trying to push forward for months.

Kyiv proposes freezing the fighting there, ceding nothing more. But Moscow wants to be handed control over the rest of the region and the US is thought to agree.

That is far from Vladimir Putin's original plan to take over all Ukraine – to "denazify" and "demilitarise" as he snarled at the time. But it would allow him to claim a victory for Russia of sorts.

"There are drones in the streets, hitting minibuses, and glide bombs fall in the city centre, leaving craters," Natalia says, describing life in Slovyansk now, where her husband had been buried.

"A few months ago, the attacks were weekly. Now it's every couple of days."

'We need to unite'

North of Natalia's hometown, up around the city of Kharkiv, there are more signs that the danger zone is spreading.

Workmen hammer stakes into the frozen ground to fit nets which they'll then stretch over the road in a canopy as protection against Russian drones.

Not far away, in an unmarked spot, we visited a workshop for Ukraine's own UAVs.

The soldiers of the Typhoon unit work in a basement filled with heaps of kit and cables, reached via a handmade wooden staircase. The men are responsible for repairing drones damaged at the frontline and for innovation: Ukraine needs every chance against an enemy with more men and more resources.

The music playing as the team work is chirpy French pop, but the soldiers' mood is mixed.

"We try not to discuss it here," 29-year old Roman replies, when I ask about giving up territory in return for peace. "People quarrel and we don't need that right now. We need to unite, and fight the Russians."

Roman lost "a lot of guys", he says, during his two years in the infantry, fighting in the Donbas.

No surprise that it's far harder to recruit these days. Last month the country's defence minister revealed that a staggering 200,000 soldiers were absent without leave.

But like many Ukrainians, Roman is sure that gifting the Donbas to Putin would not make Ukraine secure.

"The Russians will only come back for more," he says.

Hunched over a laptop in the back room, another soldier admits that "victory" in this war looks very different these days.

"I would say our victory is in preserving our statehood," Maksym argues, choosing his words carefully. "Even if we have three square kilometres of land, but we keep our constitution and our institutions, then this is still Ukraine."

He thinks the soldiers should fight on, regardless.

"Russia is 10 times our size. But still we can't surrender."

Back in Kyiv, Natalia clings to the arm of a friend, as grave diggers shovel fresh earth onto her husband's coffin then slot a wooden cross into place on top.

A photograph of Vitaly shows him smiling, posing beside a yellow sunflower.

Natalia is relieved to have her husband close again where she and their daughter, Vitalina, can visit his grave safely.

"[She] watches videos of him, looks at photos and she loves him very much even though they never met," Natalia smiles.

She also hopes to tell her husband soon that she's pregnant using the sperm the couple had frozen specially at a clinic, just a few days before Vitaliy was killed.

Many soldiers now do the same before heading for the front.

It's a brutal fact, but Natalia says none of Vitaliy's soldier friends made it to his reburial, because so many of them, too, are now dead.

Ukraine has paid an immense price already for four years of all-out war.

Ceding land to Russia that it already controls is one thing: an option now quietly accepted by many.

But Natalia can't bear the thought of Russia taking more territory, including the town where she and Vitaly lived and were in love.

She has "no doubt" her husband would have wanted the army to fight on, not concede now.

"Russia may pause for a year, then there will be another breakthrough and they'll be in Kharkiv," Natalia says.

"I just don't believe Russia will stop."

Additional reporting by Mariana Matveichuk, Anastasiia Levchenko and Paul Pradier