Good morning. Four years after Russia’s invasion, the war in Ukraine has become both tragically familiar and increasingly dangerous – more on that below, along with tariff upheaval and the Canadians stuck in Mexico. But first:

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Four years ago today, the first air-raid sirens wailed over Kyiv and everyone in the city sprinted for bomb shelters – including Globe foreign correspondent Mark MacKinnon, who had arrived in Ukraine the month before to chronicle the run-up to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The Kremlin expected a quick rout, profoundly underestimating the gutsy Ukrainian resistance. By the time MacKinnon’s editors convinced him to take a break, three weeks into the conflict, “it was clear this would be a much longer war than the Russians had forecast,” he told me. “But I don’t think anybody thought it would still be going in February, 2026.”

MacKinnon recently returned from yet another reporting trip to Ukraine, where, he writes, the tragic war has become tragically normal, as peace talks stall, Russia’s army grinds forward, and global attention shifts away. He spoke with me about the mood on the ground and the battle for U.S. President Donald Trump’s favour.

A recent poll found Ukrainians are more skeptical than they were last year that the war will end in 2026 – and also more determined to keep fighting. Is that what you heard when you were there?

Ukrainians are tired, for sure. They want the war to end. But there is no mood for surrender. They feel that this war is their generation’s responsibility, and they’re fighting it because previous generations accepted Russian interference in their country.

They feel if they accept terms that strengthen Russia’s hold on Ukraine, then they’re just kicking the can down the road, and their children will have to fight the next Russian invasion. So there’s a resolve that this war has to be for something. It has to give Ukraine real independence from Moscow.

But Ukrainians are fighting without direct U.S. military assistance, which Trump cut off early last year. What has that meant for them?

Back in 2023 and 2024, it was reasonably safe to stay in Kyiv. There were alarms all the time, you heard drones all the time, but most of the sounds that woke you up were Ukrainian air defences knocking down Russian projectiles. Nowadays, there’s a sense that those air defences are overstretched. In particular, Ukraine doesn’t have enough U.S.-made Patriot missiles to defend against fast-moving Russian ballistic and cruise missiles, so more and more are getting through, and there’s been a spike in civilian casualties. When I was in Kyiv in January, I spent more time in shelters than I had since the very start of the war.

On the front line, there’s a real imbalance not just in terms of soldiers and equipment, but simply ammunition. Ukrainian rocket and artillery teams have to choose their targets very carefully. They want to fire 10 times to take out an enemy position, but they only have two shots. Meanwhile, the Russians are firing 20 back at them. It’s resulted in this slow forward creep for the Russians in the Donbas region.

What difference have drones made in that fighting?

Drones have completely transformed the conflict – it’s probably comparable to the arrival of the tank or the catapult. If you’re a soldier in a trench, you used to be able to take cover during an enemy artillery barrage. Now a drone can come into the trench and hunt you down where you’re crouching, so it’s completely changed the risk calculation on both sides of the front line.

That’s also true for journalists. We used to feel safe enough if we were 50 kilometres from the front line. But we have to be a lot more careful, because a drone operator is effectively looking at a video-game console and can decide to take out your car. The last time we went to the front line, we did so with a drone detector, which emits an alarm if there are drones above. The Globe and Mail Foundation is now helping train Ukrainian journalists in how to deal with the drone threat, because it’s completely new for all of us.

It’s hard to say for certain how many people have died in this war, but one U.S. think tank recently estimated between 100,000 and 140,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far, and 275,000 to 325,000 Russian soldiers. Do those battlefield losses matter in Russia?

It should, but Putin has spent the past 25 years glorifying the Second World War and the millions of soldiers lost defeating Nazism. And that’s where this whole ridiculous propaganda narrative comes from, with Ukraine supposedly being a Nazi state. It’s to make the connection that, just as your grandparents sacrificed to defeat fascism in the 1940s, your generation is being called on to do the same thing.

So far, that narrative seems to be holding. It’s hard to say for sure, because I and many Western journalists have been barred from reporting inside Russia. But the sense is that this two-decade propaganda buildup before the invasion of Ukraine has insulated Putin from what we saw in Chechnya and Afghanistan, where the losses became too big for society to bear.

So what can actually move the peace talks forward?

I hesitate to call them peace talks. Real peace negotiations are a completely different animal, where you have groups dedicated to refugee rights, postwar accountability, and the safe return of children. There’s no substantive work being done by anybody to resolve all these issues. There’s an attempt by the Ukrainians to go along with this as long as they can, hoping Trump will see that it’s Putin who is obstructing genuine peace. At times, they’ve been successful in that. And the Russians are very much playing the same game: Oh, yes, we’re interested in peace, but it’s the Ukrainians who aren’t willing to make concessions.