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I think you have the Ukrainian man's perspective wrong. The Ukrainian man doesn't necessarily love Zelenskyy to the point of laying down his own life for his leader, but he does value telling the Russians to fuck off enough.
This sort of argument has been brought up many a time this year, and it's pointless for many of the same reasons that utilitarian or "realist"/"rationalist" arguments tend to fall flat: for many people, there are things that matter more than GDP or trade agreements. You may think it irrational for Ukraine to not lay down and take their annexation, or for the West to refuse the Rusgeld, but you simply don't see this from the perspective of others.
You mention Ukrainian aggression towards their seccessionists and trying to make friends with the West, and I will simply note that that is just Cold War-era tensions mixed with a good old fashioned culture war. Russia launched this invasion in the first place because they (or, rather, the idea/memeplex of Russia) have lost the culture war in Ukraine.
The realist/rationalist should support the Ukraine war. I take those labels and support the war.
Poland right now is on pace to have higher per capita income than england in 10 years. That could be Ukraines future in NATO. You get rich. Now their some shithole peasant people useful to the west as 23 year old wives for 50 year olds.
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I probably do.
Maybe they did, but that should not translate into bombing civilians with strong ties to your much bigger and stronger next door neighbor.
Wars still need to be fought. It's very impressive that the comedy actor Zelensky was able to parlay billions of dollars from the EU and US, but all it takes is for the general sentiment to turn in either or both for 'his' country to go down the drain.
Furthermore, if the average Ukrainian man is a strong nationalist willing to die for Ukraine (whatever that is), that he considered very very different than the next door Russian neighbor his ancestors shared hundreds of years of destiny with, he's in for a big surprise when he finds out what kind of people the EU and NATO have been importing on their side.
Nationalism is not really a strong value for the NATO camp, and aside from the Reddit brigade, there aren't that many people that care enough about the personal, individual fate of any Ukrainian to put their life on the line for them.
Any other year, they would have assumed the man to be some kind of patriarchal racist/xenophobe, and to an extent probably correctly.
Russia is much bigger, but not much stronger, as demonstrated by their offensive culmination in the first three months, before major land combat systems began being shipped to Ukraine in earnest.
The Soviet Union was much stronger- hence the access to Soviet economic stockpiles fueling the contemporary Russian military- but this outside-actor advantage has been countered by the Western economic stockpiles fueling the contemporary Ukrainian military. Given that the Soviet stockpiles are increasingly finite, while the western economic production is forecasted to remain overwhelming even with the economic difficulties forecasted,
Fortunately for Ukraine, the Russians have been very effective at fortifying general sentiment of the western alliance network to maintain support, which has in turn allowed western supporters to develop the internal political-interest coalitions to continue support for reasons beyond sentiment.
It turns out, when the patrons of influential interest groups becomes a pariah, domestic political actors will take the opportunity to tear said groups down and apart as part of the churn of internal politics.
Citation needed for existence of 'years of destiny', but also irrelevant- if he's in a position to be surprised, he will have already beat the Russians decisively enough to have the time and space to turn attention to western europe and care about something like that.
That's the neat point- there don't need to be. The Ukrainians don't need foreign manpower on the front line.
Fortunately, Russia has a way of helping other people come together in a more inclusive way.
If democracy is still a thing, I expect some (limited) turnover in Western Europe to the tune of 'why should we keep paying for Ukraine', and in the US, 'what happened to BLM, it's all about Ukraine'.
Most people don't really care about preventing far away countries from encroaching into other far away countries' borders.
It's hard to simultaneously say that Russia is weak and cannot sustain the war and that we need to give billions to defend against Russia, or else Russia will keep fighting these wars that they are too weak to fight.
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