BELOW the bombed university building in east Ukraine where she once worked, Olga Borodich, 64, conceded she would be ready to give up Ukrainian territory to end the war with Russia.
The Kremlin's forces have carved a path of destruction towards Pokrovsk, the logistics hub and garrison city that she calls home. Civilians are fleeing en masse and she has had enough.
More than anything her family and her neighbours want peace, she said, even if that meant surrendering land to Moscow.
"I think it's the right decision," she said. Then came the caveat: the concessions could never include her hometown.
"No. Pokrovsk can only be Ukrainian. What will happen if the Russians are here? Nothing good. A Russian flag here? Never."
Borodich's quandary points to a growing divide among Ukrainians exhausted after 2½ brutal years of warfare and whose staunch opposition to territorial concessions has been waning.
Polls conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology show there is a growing readiness to concede territory if that would end the war that has cost tens of thousands of lives — 32 per cent of respondents voiced support in May, up from 26 in February.
Across key points of the precarious front line in the Donetsk region, several residents said they would be ready to live under the Russian flag if it meant peace.
Discussions of a land swap have grown louder after Ukraine's shock offensive in the Russian border region of Kursk that has seen Ukraine claim swathes of territory.
The likelihood that land concessions could be raised at future negotiations looks likely also given Ukrainian struggles to reclaim territory captured by Russia.
"I think we need to be realistic here about what Ukraine can achieve militarily because of equipment limitations, manpower limitations and material limitations," said Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly said Ukraine would never give up land.
In an interview with French media last month, however, he said some territories could be returned through diplomacy and that any possible decision on concessions would have to be decided by the Ukrainian people.
"It's a complicated issue," he said.
An absolute majority of Ukrainians, the polling shows, are still against capitulating to Kremlin demands to surrender land, although that figure is being whittled away.
Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and several months after invading in February 2022, it claimed to incorporate four more territories into Russia, including Donetsk.
Putin has demanded that Ukrainian forces surrender those four territories as a precondition for any ceasefire or broader negotiations.
Some Western officials concede behind closed doors that Ukraine will likely have to give up land in any peace deal, but they almost all stick to the line that it is up to Kyiv to decide the terms for negotiations.
Black smoke from a recent Russian strike billowed over Svitlana apple's trees as she said it didn't matter who controlled her frontline town in the Donetsk region, so long as she got a decent night's sleep.
"It would be very painful, of course," the 71-year-old said in the mining town of Novogrodivka.
"But even if the Russians come, I'll know that I'm on my Ukrainian land in my own bed."
But another town resident, Iryna Cherednychenko, 62, baulked at the suggestion.
"So many losses. So many killed. For what? To give up territories and sit at the negotiating table now?"
Even if more Ukrainians drop their objections, and even if such a proposal were on the table, giving up land would not necessarily or immediately halt the war, analysts say.
"The idea that territorial concessions could lead to peace is simplistic," said Marie Dumoulin, a former French diplomat and director of the wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
"Some people accept the notion that it may be needed at some point to end the war, but it's not the key to ending the war.
"What will make a durable settlement is not whether Ukraine concedes territories, but whether there are deterrents to ensure Russia does not attack again."
The writer is from AFP