Slonska, who was serving food in the mess hall, had just fled from the capital Kyiv, which was being encircled by Russian troops and subject to daily missile strikes.

Her father, Anatolii Slonski, died in 2015 fighting Russian-backed separatists in the Luhansk region when a tank fired at him near the village of Troitske.

Almost one year after I met her, a lot has changed for Slonska. But a lot hasn’t.

She moved back to Kyiv and married her partner Illia on November 22. The day after her wedding, there was a major missile strike on Kyiv.

This week she sent me two photos from that time. The first photo is of the happy couple in the morning having breakfast at the Fairmont Hotel in Kyiv. The second photo shows her hunkering down in a shelter as the Russian missiles were raining down on the capital.

“I really can’t remember the number of explosions but there were a lot,” she tells me.

Slonska says she feels like she was another person before the invasion.

“I always knew that I loved my family but I had no idea this love is so deep,” she says. “And I speak not only about my immediate family. The whole of Ukraine is my family.”

Slonska says “it hurts” every time the country is attacked, and that happens every day.

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While exhausted by the conflict, there is no trace of defeatism or cynicism in Slonska.

The perseverance of Ukrainians is something I return my mind to again and again. Even in the eastern Donbas region, where some people are more loyal to Russia or largely ambivalent about the conflict, their resolve is something to behold.

In some Western countries, particularly the United States, support for providing military aid to Ukraine is starting to wane among sections of both major parties.

Here, we see an oversimplified debate taking place between those who want Ukraine to fight on and those who want a peace deal. Your opponents are either appeasers or warmongers, in the same way that a face mask either represents taking the pandemic seriously or a shameful sign of weakness.

With the war grinding to somewhat of a stalemate over the winter months, it is worth assessing the current state of play on the battlefield, the military lessons from the war and where the conflict will go in the coming months.

But we should also draw lessons from how Ukrainians all over the country have navigated the conflict.

This will help in deciding how to best support the country over the coming months and years.