I worked with a deputy public defender in a completely podunk county - his name was Ben Cole, really! - who, together with his devoutly Mormon wife, had adopted, one at a time, SIX Ukrainian children. Do you have any idea of the work and expense involved in doing that? He never even mentioned it to me; I learned about it second-hand. Even though our offices were theoretically bitter enemies (not me, fortunately, since I did only civil work), I thereafter thought of him (and still do) as Saint Ben.
Somewhat more relevant to this thread: On the first morning of my first visit to Minsk in 2007, I happened to have breakfast at the Minsk Hotel with a woman form the State Department. She mentioned Ukraine as a cautionary tale. In contrast to the other former Soviet republics, she feared that Ukraine was too quickly embracing the worst of Western culture. At that time, Ukraine seemed to be riding high - but it was indeed a hotbed of Western-style corruption. Certainly, we cannot "blame" Ukraine for Putin's unilateral invasion, but I have to wonder if it would have happened if Ukraine had not moved so quickly toward Westernization.
To close on a humorous note that my wife taught me: She said that the Ukrainian language is so "unmelodic" that a Soviet expression for anything that simply doesn't work was "Ukraine opera." At the moment, Russia's invasion is proving to be something of a Ukraine opera for Putin.
