Taras Kryvyy, a 29-year-old financial analyst from Ukraine, is skeptical about the chances of a peace deal being brokered between his country and Russia.
"Either Ukraine decides to have a bad peace now and we have a 10% chance of surviving as a sovereign state. Or, we persist, and it's like a coin flip," he told RTÉ News, in a Starbucks in central Warsaw.
Mr Kryvyy's surname shares almost the same spelling as his home city of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, a predominantly Russian-speaking city where the country’s president Volodymyr Zelenksy also grew up.
A decade ago, Mr Kryvyy moved to Poland straight after secondary school to study a business degree.
These days he juggles work as a financial analyst with a PhD he is completing on energy transition.
"A lot of people think there is a lot happening," he said, referring to US-led efforts to broker a peace agreement.
However, he believes Russia's claim over occupied Ukrainian regions is "like a bomb that cannot be resolved", since Russia is unlikely to reverse its so-called annexation of the four Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
For Mr Kryvyy, giving up Ukraine's most fortified regions, like Donetsk, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded, is a "no go".
"The Ukrainians who live in the occupied territories will be second-class citizens".
Over the course of a day, I met other young Ukrainians who live and work in the Polish capital to gauge their views on current US-led efforts to end the war.
Going by statistics from Warsaw City Council from December 2024 and January 2025, there may be as many as 170,000 Ukrainian citizens living in the Polish capital out of a population of two million people.
Many Ukrainians living and working in Warsaw are in their 20s and 30s and are quick to learn Polish, a language that shares similarities with Ukrainian.
"We cannot sign any agreements with Russia because Russia does not respect any papers," said Iryna Antoniuk, who I met in the lobby of a plush office block that houses co-working spaces.
The 30-year-old marketing specialist came to Poland in March 2022, one week after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
She spent the first week of the war in Kyiv, sheltering in the basement of her apartment block with other residents as Russian forces tried to encircle the city.
"At that moment, I just saw a black wall, no colours. It was the first time in my life that I could not plan something".
A week later, she was one of many tens of thousands of Ukrainian women and children who journeyed by train from Kyiv to western Ukraine, before travelling on to Poland.
In Warsaw, she got a job with the Polish division of the same multinational firm she had worked for in Kyiv.
A graduate of international relations, she listed off the details of a security guarantee signed by Russia in 1997 that pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and the failed Minsk Agreement in 2015.
"I remember that Ukraine was just forced to sign this agreement. On paper, it meant that there was some peace agreement, but, in reality, it was a continuation of war in the eastern part of Ukraine."
Ukraine and Russia signed the Minsk Agreement, brokered by France and Germany in February 2015, to reach a settlement over Russia's proxy war in Donetsk and Luhansk.
However, pro-Russian separatists, backed by Moscow, broke the Minsk-II truce within hours of the agreement being signed.
Ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia as part of a peace agreement is not an option in her view.
"Each centimetre of our land is in the blood of Ukrainian people who are fighting now for our independence and sovereignty and peace.
"Only providing military systems to Ukraine can help because Russia understands only hard power."
When I asked Ms Antoniuk what she thought about US President Donald Trump's meeting with his Russian counterpart in Alaska two weeks ago, her response was swift:
"Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and the only place for him is The Hague."
Ukraine should prepare for the worst case scenario, said Viktoria Pogrebniak, a 30-year-old marketing professional, also originally from western Ukraine and who has lived in Warsaw for the past 11 years.
She defines that "worst-case scenario" as the United States stepping back from the negotiating process, with Ukraine and Europe left to deal with Russia.
Overall, Ms Pogrebniak was pessimistic about the direction of the current US-led peace process and said that only those who "do not know history" could agree to ceding land to Russia.
"There is a whole list of territories Russia was either involved in occupying or occupied itself, starting with Georgia, Abkhazia, Ossetia, ending up with Crimea, and, of course, the Donbas region.
"Every territory that they are taking is not the last one, until somebody is really stopping Russia from attempting to get another territory."
In a quiet district of the Polish capital, not far from the centre, I met Valeriia Shakhunova, a 25-year-old from Kherson who now works for a Ukrainian foundation in Warsaw.
We met a few hours after reports came in of Thursday's massive Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv, which killed 23 people, including four children.
"I am angry, but also I am tired. I see that it happened again and again," she said, speaking of the morning attack.
"The Ukrainian side, we are ready to do something. From the Russian side, I think they are not."
Ms Shakhunova's parents and two younger brothers now live in the Kyiv region, having left Kherson in August 2022 whilst it was still under Russian occupation.
The family drove through fields for seven days, avoiding roads and Russian checkpoints, to reach Ukrainian lines.
Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson in November 2022 towards the end of Kyiv's counteroffensive that year.
Last June, during a visit to Kyiv to see her family, Ms Shakhunova, her father and one of her brothers travelled south to Kherson to see their family home, located in an area that Ukrainian forces control.
Russian forces control 74% of Kherson region and Russian drones continually target Kherson city.
"I wanted to take some pictures from my childhood because now I understood that Kherson will not be in peace anymore for now. So for the first time, I decided I needed to collect my pictures and bring them to Warsaw," said Ms Shakhunova.
The visit saddened her, not because of seeing her childhood home all locked up, but because she could not imagine how the remaining residents, mostly elderly, continued to live under the threat of Russian drone attacks.
"They need to sleep and live mainly in the basement, but for some reason they are not able to leave," Ms Shakhunova added.
"I don't believe Russia will stop.
"I believe that even if, for now, they take these territories, and we will have peace, I don't know, for 10 years, they will use it, they will accumulate their power and they will go again."
