It's very unfortunate that we are into a second cold war now with Russia and soon to be China. This year, for the first time ever, Russia is not invited to the D-Day celebrations. Europeans know who liberated them from the Nazis, and for everyone East of the Rhine it was most very likely not the Americans, but the Soviets.

A personal anecdote. My son's step-grandfather Hellmut (who died about 5 years ago) was an Austrian conscript in WWII. After his compulsory military service in Austria, all the Austrian soldiers were pressed into the German army.

On the day they were all to depart, Hellmut's commanding officer lined them all up and then went down the line, calling out, "East, West, East, West," as he pointed at each young man. Hellmut was to go east, however another young man had a brother who had already gone east, and he wanted to go east to find his brother, so he swapped with Hellmut.

Hellmut lived and had quite a career after the war. Neither the young man he swapped with, nor his brother, nor most of the men who went east ever returned.

The losses on the Eastern Front in WWII were catastrophic on both sides, and was the main reason that the Nazis lost WWII.

Those catastrophic losses by the Soviets, many in Ukraine as you note in your story, are why the Russians saw and see Ukraine joining an adversarial military alliance - NATO - as an existential threat. As many as 1/7th of all Russians died in WWII fighting the Nazis who came in through Ukraine.

We in the West may not agree that Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia. The Russians do, and that is what matters.