Before Vladimir Putin told the world of his intention for a ceasefire, the pressure on Ukraine to agree a deal with Russia to end the war had been ramping up.

Donald Trump’s administration welcomed the Kremlin’s proposed three-day halt to the fighting, which coincided with Moscow’s Second World War Victory Day military parade, as a positive sign that peace could be brokered.

But in Kyiv, Putin’s ceasefire was greeted with scepticism. President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to agree, labelling the move “another manipulation” that was about preventing embarrassment while Red Square was filled with pageantry.

The Ukrainian leader said: “For some reason, everyone is supposed to wait until May 8 before ceasing fire – just to provide Putin with silence for his parade. We value human lives, not parades.”

At that stage, the US believed Ukraine’s preferred option, a 30-day pause in the fighting, could be agreed upon, and was pushing both sides to commit.

But in the days that followed, everything changed.

Signs that Trump was losing patience with Putin began before the ­ceasefire announcement.

He was pictured recently in a knee-to-knee seated conversation with Zelensky at Pope Francis’s funeral, and then published a post on his Truth Social network about feeling strung along by the Russian leader.

A “$500billion” deal granting the US opportunities to exploit Ukraine’s vast mineral resources was subsequently agreed and then, out of the blue, came news that the Americans planned to scale back their role as peace brokers.

According to Tammy Bruce, the State Department press secretary, they were no longer willing to “fly around the world at the drop of a hat” and planned to leave the countries alone to negotiate.

These movements might have appeared seismic to the watching world. But on the streets of Kyiv, the average Ukrainian was as tired as the US Government with the politics.

A popular line among Ukrainians when asked about a recent diplomatic development is “blah, blah, blah” – shorthand for “more talk and no action”.

They have seen that, whether it is Trump or Joe Biden in the White House, no outside force has been able to affect the frontline violence or nightly drone attacks on their cities since the full-scale invasion began.

“Politicians from many countries are just telling fairy tales. For three years, nothing has been done,” said Kyiv music teacher Natalia Konorukova, before adding: “Blah, blah, blah.”

A few nights earlier, she was woken in the early hours of the morning by the tremor from a rocket attack that left nine dead.

The onslaught killed children, and many neighbours lined up to lay flowers beside the wreckage of the building flattened by a Russian warhead.

But if the intention was to demoralise civilian morale, it is not working.

“Russia and Putin do not frighten us with terrorist acts,” said resident Oleksandr Antonyuk, as he surveyed the rubble. “No matter how scared we are, we must not abandon our direction. Our way is still civilized. Putin will not break us and change our minds. We will win, it’s a matter of time.”

These days, such rousing spirit of the Blitz-like talk of Ukraine winning the war will sound as alien in Washington as it would in Moscow.

The US’s peace settlements under Trump have proposed Putin keep great swathes of Ukraine. Influential isolationist voices, like Vice President JD Vance, consistently suggest Kyiv sucks it up and just takes a deal.

“Yes, of course, [the Ukrainians] are angry that they were invaded,” Vance told Fox News at the start of May. But are we going to continue to lose thousands and thousands of soldiers over a few miles of territory this or that way?”

The answer in Ukraine is that this war is not so much a contest for land as a fight for existence.

In the occupied regions of the country, children are being abducted and brainwashed into believing Russian propaganda, while passport applications are fast-tracked to boost the number of citizens it can count on in these territories.

One of those taken, Kseniya Koldin, 20, said that in the camps and schools, where the youngsters were being held, their previous culture was being eradicated.

“If you speak Ukrainian or display Ukrainian symbols, they will report you to a police officer. It is made to feel like a crime,” she said. “They are taking Ukrainian children and turning them into Russians.”

Putin makes no secret of his belief that Ukraine is not a country and has felt emboldened in the past few years to ­promote the lie to a global audience.

He spent large swathes of a 2024 ­interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson lecturing the conservative media star with obscure history to prop up his wild claims.

“The Soviet Government created Soviet Ukraine,” he said in a propaganda video a year earlier, where he spouted similar ­theories while going over a 17th century map. “This is well known to everyone. Until then, there was never any Ukraine in the ­history of humanity.”

It is a source of constant frustration that, in the US particularly, the extremist nature of the Russian stance is not fully appreciated. How can they trust a country to respect any type of agreement if they don’t believe their land exists?

“The war didn’t start in 2022, it began with the invasion of Crimea and is 11 years old,” said Konstantin Batotskiy, a political consultant and former top-level adviser.

“In that time, we’ve tried everything with ceasefires, security guarantees. And it did not work.

“To cut a long story short, Russians never keep their word. It’s impossible to track what they say and control [what they do].”

Like Zelensky, Batotskiy believes Putin’s latest three-day ceasefire is a strategic move that will not impact his long-term goal of controlling the entire country.

The political operative was also dismissive of the minerals deal and the so-called ­economic “stake” it gives the US in Ukraine’s future.

“This agreement is just some piece of paper to satisfy Trump,” Batotskiy added.

“Ukraine doesn’t take this minerals deal seriously because it will take billions of investment to extract them and the best miners of rare earth materials in the world are not the Americans, they are the Chinese.

“We have a different legal system from Britain and the United States. Even if you own a piece of land, everything that is ­underneath doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the nation of Ukraine.” Batotskiy suggested that the whole thing was a ploy designed to improve relations between Trump and Zelensky.

“The idea for this minerals deal came from US Senator [and Trump supporter] Lindsey Graham, who has the reputation of a strong supporter of Ukraine,” he added. “The agreement was his proposal for Ukrainians to try to build a bridge with Trump.”

The problem for Kyiv is less about whether the deal has substance and more a case of if it is enough to prevent President Trump from losing interest.

When he had campaigned to become the president, the Republican nominee had repeatedly said he “would have it solved within one day”.

More than 100 days have now passed since he set up shop in the Oval Office, and he is now moving towards ending ­negotiations altogether.

If the US does disappear, it is bad news for Ukraine, which needs continual support to fight an enemy with giant resources, from weapons to wealth.

On the ground, people just want the war to end after three years of constant fighting. But they are clear – that does not mean ­letting Putin win.

“I really want just for the war to end because it’s a nightmare,” said Lumyla Bilyavtseva, 60, as she stood beneath a residential tower block where two people had died from a Russian rocket blast just hours before Putin’s ceasefire began.

She added: “I will pray and wait for the victory. We believe that winning will stop this bloodshed.”