>fighting for his countries freedom against a totalitarian regime
He sent hundreds of thousands of his own people into a meat grinder to fight for the privilege of being ruled by his corrupt government (recognised as one of the most corrupt governments in Europe) instead of a different corrupt government, with his thugs literally going door-to-door dragging unwilling youths off to die. The average Ukrainian wasn't any better off under Ukrainian government than under Russian government, and they'd certainly be much better off alive than dead.
The vast majority of them volunteered. And that's just conscription -- every country would do the same in such a situation. The US pursued and prosecuted thousands of cases of draft dodging in WW2, forcing most of them to go and fight.
In the short term, certainly. In the longer term? I'm pretty glad not to have been born into an occupied British puppet state. If not for a man with the obstinacy of Zelenskyy, I might have been.
It was always ironic that Trump kept a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office but after today, it's almost obscene.
In the longer term there's realistically no chance of Ukraine regaining the land it lost. In both this scenario and that scenario Russia annexes part of Eastern Ukraine, but in that scenario there aren't hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians.
He sent hundreds of thousands of his own people into a meat grinder to fight for the privilege of being ruled by his corrupt government (recognised as one of the most corrupt governments in Europe) instead of a different corrupt government, with his thugs literally going door-to-door dragging unwilling youths off to die. The average Ukrainian wasn't any better off under Ukrainian government than under Russian government, and they'd certainly be much better off alive than dead.