The winter of 2016-17 was hard, made worse by the conflict. A Russian-born woman in her late 70s — who, like most people I spoke with here, asked that her name not be used because of fears of reprisal — lives in an apartment with a concrete floor and walls that bleed warmth. Some winter nights, the temperature hit minus 19 Celsius (minus 2 Fahrenheit) — colder, in fact, with the harsh winds that blow unimpeded across the plains. She said there had not been gas heat available since 2014. In winter, she uses electric space heaters that cost as much as $100 per month to run, though her monthly pension is only about $35.

“I do extra jobs to make enough money to live,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “I sweep the school grounds and grow vegetables.” She has kept a jug of water by her window ever since shrapnel from a rocket caused a rug to catch fire.

Many of those who remain in the war zone are elderly, frail, destitute or too stubborn to move. One woman in her late 80s lives in the battle-torn town of Avdiivka. Her apartment walls are scarred by bullets and shrapnel, and the wallpaper in the living room is black with soot; a stray rocket set her balcony on fire in 2014. She has been reduced to depending on the charity of strangers.

“This war is worse than the last one,” she told me last year, referring to World War II, in which she served for the Soviet Union. “After the hardship of my younger years, I never thought I would see war again, especially as an old woman.”

All told, the conflict has displaced between two million and three and a half million people. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 1.6 million Ukrainians moved west toward Ukraine’s capital, Kiev as a result of the fighting. Russia says that 2.6 million Ukrainians moved east. In its report ending March 12, the refugee agency also estimated that from mid-April 2014 to mid-March 2017, at least 9,940 people have been killed and 23,455 wounded.

Border towns like Avdiivka and Marinka hold on, barely. Other places between the lines have it even worse. When I visited Opytne in August 2016, its population was 13, a fraction of what it was before the war, according to residents. Many buildings were abandoned. One smelled like a slaughterhouse. Former municipal buildings had holes in their floors and ceilings. Festive murals of village life were chipped and faded. Centrifuges rusted in a former agricultural lab while birds nested among rotting books and technical manuals in a former library. The few civilians I encountered during that trip lounged outside while an old woman cooked over an open wood fire.

With the not-war in eastern Ukraine now in its fourth year, President Trump has failed to accomplish even the most modest improvement on President Obama’s dismal record managing Russia’s intrusion on Ukrainian territory. While America’s president is distracted by the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, President Vladimir Putin weighs Russia’s options in Ukraine. The ongoing violence, combined with a recent spate of assassinations and assassination attempts in Ukraine, does not bode well for regional stability. If Russia invades, it could precipitate a broader European conflict, and the 800,000 Ukrainian civilians gritting their teeth in the silence between artillery barrages could become eight million.