Great post but I believe there is another factor that contributed to early support for this war by Ukrainians but has since soured and that, I believe, is the manufacture of a mythical separate Ukrainian identity. Historically this is a tactic that has often been employed, especially by Nazis, to make the people feel that they're engaged in a glorious patriotic crusade for their country. And if you want to know how common this has been done and how easily it can be achieved consider the Confederacy in the lead up to and during the American civil war. It was a popular belief at the time, promoted by the aristocracy of the Southern states, that the people of the South were really a very different people to the people of the North. It really is a very easy thing to exaggerate minor inconsequential differences and pretend they mean that the people are fundamentally different. Make no mistake, if the South had won the Civil war and managed to secede from the Union they would have been telling you today that they are different people to the North.
With the Billions Victoria Nuland admitted America spent to orchestrate the coup in Ukraine in 2014 a great deal of those monies went to propagandizing the Ukrainian population into believing that they are fundamentally separate people to the Russians. Thats how evil the American deep-state Neocons are.
