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A lot of things in life depend on perspective. Some people viewed last Friday’s bust-up in the Oval Office as caused by President Zelensky being unnecessarily combative with his hosts.
Others saw the President and Vice President of the world’s superpower ganging up on the leader of a country that is the victim of three years of invasion and brutal war.
I watched the exchange from Ukraine, at a position on that country’s front-lines.
The Russian forces were less than two miles from where I was positioned last week.
The drive there had to be done in the middle of the night because the stretch of road towards the front was constantly being shelled and droned in daylight hours.
But during the dead of night I was dropped off beside a dugout in which members of one of Ukraine’s drone units were at work.
I made my way back to the frontlines of the Ukraine conflict because I wanted to see for myself what the situation is.
Not the war that people talk about, or the political arguments and gossip that everybody gets distracted by. But the reality.
Even in the capital of Kyiv – far from the front lines – life is far from normal. On the first night I was there heavy gunfire broke out at 4 a.m.
The Ukrainian forces were trying to shoot down Russian air assaults on the capital. The next night the air-raid sirens went off at midnight and the citizens of the city retired to Kyiv’s bomb shelters.
But this is peaceful compared to the situation in the East of the country, where the Russian forces are still trying to push forward and seize Ukrainian land.
For the past two years these areas have been in a form of stalemate. But not complete stalemate. Both sides intermittently gain or lose land.
There is no doubt that both sides have been badly bruised. Yet it is not the case that Russian victory is inevitable.
While in the country I spoke with soldiers who have recently encountered North Korean troops on the battlefield.
The fact that Vladimir Putin has had to draft in 10,000 or so troops from Kim Jong Un is not a sign of Russian military strength.
The North Korean authorities handed these men over to Putin to be thrown at the Ukrainian front and to die there. It is pathetic watching these soldiers in a totally alien environment, dying for a country they do not know in a battle they have no expertise in.
The Ukrainians have had the advantage of Western – especially American – military support. But they have another advantage too. Which is that they are fighting for something.
As Putin throws a generation of Russian conscripts at the front-lines he has to hope that they believe him when he says that Ukraine is a fascist country which must be “de-Nazified”, from its Jewish President on down.
He has to hope that three years into the war Russian conscripts are still willing to die for his lies.
By contrast the Ukrainian army has the advantage that all armies have when they are the subjects of the assault: they are fighting for something.
The drone unit I was with had a number of positions along the front. They often work throughout the night, but when I got to them in the early morning everyone but their commander was asleep.
I sat by the entrance to the snowy dugout as the sound of artillery shells reverberated through the night air.
The area we were in was between the Ukrainian and Russian lines. So when both sides fire artillery at the other – near constantly at all hours – this is the place where the shells fly overhead. Hopefully.
But here a more modern form of war is also being waged. A war which Ukrainian soldiers have been excelling at.
The Achilles unit was put together at the start of the war and swiftly grew into a regiment. They have become world-experts at drone-warfare.
The conscription age in Ukraine now starts at 25 and so most of the men I was with were in their late twenties or early thirties.
One of them – Yaroslav – spent his time before the Russian invasion training to become an ecologist. But from the day that the Russians attacked he joined the infantry and spent the first two years of the war there.
In this war it is a remarkable thing to survive two years in the infantry. Though Yaroslav only just did.
Last year he was in an armored car when a Russian anti-tank missile flew into the vehicle’s back. It killed the friend seated in front of him, but Yaroslav, 28, managed to get out of the burning vehicle.
Though not without injury — as the mutilation of his back shows. He spent six months in a burns recovery unit. And when he got out he immediately retrained for the drones unit.
The moment that the alarm clock goes in the early hours they are off to work. The men who arm and launch the drones get the explosives together for the first flights of the day.
The men who sit with their VR goggles in front of computer monitors get ready for the signal and then start to hunt for the enemy.
Sometimes they encounter “jamming” devices from the Russians. Sometimes they manage to find these devices and take them out too.
But most of the time the aim is to find Russian troops who are trying to advance on their territory.
At one point in the day they find two Russian soldiers breaking cover and running into a derelict building. The drone comes down and kills them both on the screen in front of me.
At other times they are searching for Russian arms dumps or vehicles.
At one point three Russian soldiers who have presumably spotted the Ukrainian drone escape from their vehicle and run in every direction, scattering in the snow. The unit blows up their vehicle.
It will be a long walk for the invading Russians to get back.
Units like these have been at the forefront of protecting Ukraine. One of the drone-operators tells me of a full-scale Russian push last year in which they flew drone after drone at the Russian forces, destroying vehicles, setting others on fire.
Along with the artillery and other forces the Ukrainians managed not just to push back the Russian assault but to destroy it.
While I am with them the news from the White House starts to come through. The soldiers I am with tell me that they are advised not to follow the news too closely.
But these are millenials and Generation Z, so inevitably in their down time they scroll through Instagram and other social media.
I watch them in their rare moments of downtime. Sometimes they are scrolling through funny dog videos, other times updates from friends, other times news like the news from the Zelensky-Trump-JD Vance blow-up at the White House.
I ask the young commander of the unit what he makes of it?
“S—t happens every day,” he says as he returns to his command post. “For now, we have a lot of work to do.”
And why do they do it? Why do they spend their winters in a freezing dugout, surrounded by snow, in bunk beds, in conditions that bring to my mind – at least – the trench warfare of World War I.
“It is crucial for me that the Russians don’t come closer” one of them says. “My house is literally 50 km [31 miles] from here. For me it is literally a matter of survival.”
Of course all the time there is one thing on my mind, as it is on all of theirs. Which is that just as we are watching the Russians, so they must be watching – or trying to watch – us.
Every time I head out from underground to watch another drone being launched we keep our eyes on the skies for Russian drones hovering overhead.
By comparison with older forms of warfare, drone warfare is relatively cheap. But it is also suitably paranoia-inducing. As the North Korean soldiers found out.
On the night I left the unit and headed back west news came of a Russian direct hit on one of the bases of the unit I had been with.
An hour after we left, the Russians managed to locate a Ukrainian position and dropped one of their thermobaric bombs onto their position.
I will not describe the injuries that these devices cause, but the men who survived looked as though they had not.
Their faces were charred black like that of a corpse, their limbs mutilated almost beyond recognition.
Anybody with any humanity would want to end this war. But the terms on which it is ended are everything.
Because for the Ukrainian soldiers this is not about personalities. It is about their survival as a country.
Whatever the politicians say, it is hard to imagine any scenario in which what these men have fought so hard to defend is something they will now give up.