Odesa, UKRAINE — Ukraine’s audacious drone attacks on Russian air bases this weekend gave Kyiv a much-needed morale boost amid growing frustration in the country over President Trump’s approach to the war.

Ukraine claimed it destroyed dozens of Russia’s long-distance and nuclear-capable bombers with explosive drones smuggled across the border, although open-source reporting has not confirmed all of Ukraine’s claims.

The stunning military maneuver counters Trump’s narrative that Ukraine is on the brink of defeat, but it “doesn’t change everything,” said Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament in the opposition European Solidarity party.

“I hope maybe after such operation Russians will also realize that they also need ceasefire. Maybe from this point of view it will help. For the moment it’s great operation, but I don’t feel it immediately changes a lot,” he told The Hill.

The Hill traveled to Ukraine’s southern port city Odesa last week, interviewing officials, volunteers in the war effort, and people on the street about their feelings of the course of the war and relations with the U.S.

Volodymyr Dubovyk, professor of international relations at Odesa Mechnikov National University, said that while Ukrainians are worn down from three years of war, they are not prepared to swallow Russia’s conditions for a ceasefire — such as recognizing Russian sovereignty over occupied territories and restrictions on their military.

“Exhaustion in Ukraine is very real,” he said. “But at the same time, people are not having any appetite for capitulation and surrender, because, after all, so much being lost already, so many lives lost — what for? Then to give to Russia what it wanted from the very beginning? That doesn't make sense for a lot of Ukrainians.”

Trump has neither criticized nor endorsed Ukraine’s cross-border operation, but he........

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