Putin's aggression behind sea change in Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia

When I visited Kyiv in September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a worried man. No one seemed to care, he told a gathering of European officials and foreign policy experts, that Russia had invaded Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and occupied it for eight years. 

The West’s seeming indifference to the specter of an escalating full-blown conflict on the European continent for the first time since the Cold War, he complained, left him feeling politically isolated and Ukraine increasingly vulnerable. When it came to battling Russia or the deadliest global pandemic in modern times, the gap between the West's rhetorical support for his country and its actions led him to conclude that Ukraine was on its own. In such crises, he lamented, "it's every man for himself."