The drone operators from the Ukrainian national guard’s Kara Dag Brigade may not have realized they were committing a profound act of political defiance when, on or just before Tuesday, they hunted down a Russian drone team on the snowy battlefield just south of Vodyane in eastern Ukraine’s southern Donetsk Oblast.

The same day, U.S. and Russian negotiators met in Riyadh to discuss closer ties between Russia and the United States and possible paths toward ending the war in Ukraine—on terms favoring Russia, the aggressor. Russia would keep the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine it occupies.

Notably, Ukraine was not invited to send its own diplomats to the talks.

And as the United States veered away from longstanding alliances with European democracies and toward a brutal authoritarian regime, U.S. Pres. Donald Trump tried to shift blame for Russia’s three-year wider war on Ukraine onto Ukraine. “You should have never started it,” Trump said from his Florida estate, addressing Ukrainian leaders who did not start the war.

“You could have made a deal,” Trump added, apparently unaware that Ukraine did make a deal with Russia—the 2014 Minsk Accord—and that Russia used the deal as cover to rearm for further attacks on Ukraine.

But there’s very little the United States can do to compel Ukraine to stop fighting against its Russian invaders and their North Korean allies. And Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky knows it. “If we didn’t accept this ultimatum at the most difficult time, why there is a feeling that Ukraine will accept it now?” he said.

Contrary to Trump’s claim, the United States is not Ukraine’s biggest supporter. With European pledges of $130 billion versus U.S. pledges of $110 billion, “Europe as a whole has clearly overtaken the U.S. in terms of Ukraine aid,” the Kiel Institute in Germany noted.

As Trump led his party, his administration and the country he governs into Russia’s authoritarian embrace on Tuesday, Zelensky immediately pivoted—meeting or calling Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and French Pres. Emmanuel Macron to firm up European support for a continuing Ukrainian war effort.

Meanwhile, a German official has hinted at a possible $730-billion European aid deal that, if enacted in the coming months, could radically transform Ukraine’s military and sustain Ukrainian resistance for years.

All that is to say, Ukraine can keep fighting regardless of what Trump says. And that Ukrainian drone patrol near Vodyane on Tuesday demonstrated this enduring capacity for resistance.

The Kara Dag Brigade operators were hunting for Russian drone teams. In particular, teams deploying fiber-optic drones that send and receive signals via millimeters-thick wires rather than via radio—a method of control that helps the operators circumvent intensive Ukrainian radio jamming.

Ukraine has fewer troops and less artillery than Russia, but it has more and better drones, many of which are made in Ukraine and paid for with Ukrainian and European funds.

Preserving that drone advantage—and thus preserving Ukraine’s main means of resistance—requires the Ukrainians blunt any effort by the Russians to boost their own robotic capabilities. Spotting the reflection of fiber-optic cables, the Kara Dag Brigade operators showed the way forward for the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces and its legion of drones.

They followed the sunlight-reflecting fibers back to the Russian team’s hidden base in a clutch of snow-covered buildings—and struck the hapless Russian operators with explosive first-person-view drones.

It was a tactical victory with a strategic message. America may choose to bow to Russia, but Ukraine doesn’t have to.