It must be one of the most dangerous book clubs in the world. Before they can feel safe enough to talk about poetry and prose, 17-year-old Mariika (not her real name) and her friends have to first ensure all the windows are shut and check there is no one lurking by the flat’s doors.

Informants frequently report anyone studying Ukrainian in the occupied territories to the Russian secret police. Ukrainian textbooks have been deemed “extremist” – possession can carry a sentence of five years.

Parents who allow their children to follow the Ukrainian curriculum online can lose parental rights. Teens who speak Ukrainian at school have been known to be taken by thugs to the woods for “questioning”.

That is why the book club never meets with more than three people – any extra members would pose further risk of being discovered.

Apart from the danger, there is another challenge: finding the books themselves. In the town where Mariika lives, the occupiers have removed and destroyed the Ukrainian books from several libraries – nearly 200,000 works of politics, history and literature lost in one town alone.

So Mariika and her friends have to use online versions – careful to scrub their search history afterwards. The authorities like to seize phones and computers to check for “extremist” content.

Among the poems and plays Mariika’s book club likes to read are those of Lesya Ukrainka, the 19th-century Ukrainian feminist and advocate of the country’s independence under the Russian empire.

In 1888 Ukrainka also formed a book club, in tsarist-era Kyiv, at a time when publishing, performing and teaching in Ukrainian was banned. Ukrainka’s works, in turn, explore the 17th-century struggle of Ukraine for independence from Moscow.

In the dramatic poem The Boyar Woman, the heroine chides a Ukrainian nobleman who has come under the cultural influence of Muscovy and praises a humiliating peace with the tsar that has “calmed” Ukraine: “Is this peace,” she asks, “or a ruin?”

The question could not be more apposite in a week during which the US president spoke to Vladimir Putin to discuss a “peace” in Ukraine that many fear will be ruinous for Kyiv. The story of Mariika’s book club is a glimpse of the larger reason why the negotiation strategy Donald Trump is adopting risks missing the essence of Russia’s invasion.

To hear Trump talk, all we need for peace is to redraw some lines across the map of Eurasia; split up some “assets”; give Putin guarantees about Ukraine not joining Nato. Trump is allegedly toying with recognising Crimea as part of Russia already.

But this idea that Putin will be ­satisfied with some haggling over territory misreads Russia’s aims, which are to destroy Ukraine’s right to exist independently, politically and culturally. It is a centuries-long objective, stretching from the tsars through to Soviet leaders and today’s Kremlin.

Over the centuries, Russia’s tactics have adapted. During the Russian empire, Ukraine was conquered, and its language and literature were suppressed. At other times, the Kremlin used mass starvation and the mass murder of intellectuals, as in the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, when about 4 million people were killed by Stalin’s policies.

During the later years of the Soviet Union, the approach was subtler: some Ukrainian schools and a small amount of publishing were allowed but if you wanted to prosper, you had to speak Russian. Ukrainian poets and activists who asked for more national rights were sent to the last labour camps as late as the mid-1980s.

Since 2004, Russia has been using strategic corruption, information wars and outright invasion to reassert control. This latest round of negotiations with Trump is just another opportunity to achieve that greater aim. The immediate tactic is to split Europe from the US, then try to destabilise Ukraine politically while continuing to advance militarily.

Of all the demands Putin is making to Trump, two are the most toxic: a limit to Ukraine’s army and that the country officially recognises the territory seized by Russia. The first means the remaining part of sovereign Ukraine would risk invasion at any moment and would cease to be independent in any meaningful way.The second would mean abandoning Ukrainians inside the occupied lands and normalising Russia’s vast experiment in colonial social engineering to forcibly change the nature of Ukrainian society.

To understand why Ukrainians worry so much about the American approach to peace, look at what is happening inside the occupied territories. Based on the research of the Reckoning Project and other human rights groups documenting Russia’s crimes, we can see a coherent strategy.

As it has done for centuries among its colonies, the Kremlin is changing the population on the ground by deporting local people and importing new ones with no connection to Ukraine. Since 2014, more than 50,000 Ukrainians have been forced to leave Crimea and about 700,000 Russian citizens brought in, many of them with military and security service backgrounds.

Illegal arrests, torture, killings and disappearances have become commonplace. Amnesty International has recorded 700 cases in the newly occupied territories since 2022 – but that is likely to be only a fraction of the true number.

More than 19,000 children have been forcibly removed to Russia to indoctrinate them and break their connection to Ukraine. This forced deportation has led Putin to be indicted by the international criminal court in The Hague.

The US government has alarmingly just defunded the remarkable group of researchers at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, who use satellite imagery and other open-source tools to track the abducted children. And then there are the 1.5 million children who are still inside the occupied territories, but who are being forced to abandon their Ukrainian heritage, attend military youth groups and ultimately be conscripted into the Russian army to kill other Ukrainians.

“They don’t teach us knowledge at school,” said Mariika, “but to hate other Ukrainians. They’ve taken down all Ukrainian symbols and have hung portraits of Putin everywhere. History is all about ‘great Russia’ and how it’s always been under attack by others.”

The curriculum defines Ukraine as a minor “brother nation” in the greater all-Russian identity, united by the greatness of the Russian language, and scientific and cultural achievements, and Russia’s “holy duty” to defend itself from enemies.

History textbooks constantly refer to Russia as “us” – as in “our Russian history”, “our mother Russia”. When Ukrainian achievements are mentioned, they are only in the context of greater Russian or Soviet ones, such as fighting in the second world war or cold war scientific innovation. Colonies are described as “entering” into or “joining” Russia over the centuries.

Stalin’s repressions, in which about 20 million Soviet citizens were murdered, take up one and half pages in the textbook. They are described as “harsh measures” but with barely a mention of their horrors.

The enforced famines of the 1920s and 1930s are glossed over as part of a greater campaign against peasants across the USSR. According to these schoolbooks, there was no specific anti-Ukraine campaign. The collapse of the USSR, meanwhile, is presented as a tragedy that splintered a beautiful whole that needs to be restored.

Russia’s new university curriculum expands on the definition of “Russian civilisation”. It claims Russians have a “civilisational DNA” that leads them to respect stability and to feel unified with the institutions of the state. To be a part of the Russian world is to be “scientifically” loyal to the Kremlin.

Whatever last week’s negotiations lead to, the rights of Ukrainians in the occupied territories need to be taken into account. Their right to freedom of expression and thought.

For what it is worth, Russia is a signatory to agreements such as the UN convention on the rights of the child, which includes the right to maintain cultural, religious and political identity. Even Russian military manuals forbid forcing “persons belonging to the enemy party to participate in hostilities against their country”.

Part of what keeps Mariika’s book club going is the desire for people outside the occupied territories to realise that there are people fighting for their right to exist as Ukrainians. Not all the books the club has been reading are overtly political. Sometimes they enjoy reading books that are just about normal life of young women in Ukraine – about dating and shopping.

These tales take on a greater meaning in the occupied territories – a way to stay in touch with everyday life in the rest of the country. Novels have always helped to make you feel part of the community, of a nation.

But still there is no getting away from the all-too-relevant ideas of Ukrainka’s writing. One of her main themes was to meditate on the relationship between personal freedom – the freedom of the imagination and to define your life – and the political freedom of the nation. “Whoever liberates themselves, shall be free,” she wrote.

Mariika’s book club makes those words real every day.

Reporting for this story was based on research collected by The Reckoning Project