"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was back in Washington earlier this week begging for more money and guns. ... reception was different than it has been in the past.

At the beginning, he was widely feted across the U.S. and Europe; politicians couldn’t wait to get their pictures taken shaking his hand. Fast forward through busted victory predictions, endless costly subsidies, bloody failed counterattacks, and mass Ukrainian casualties. Increasing burdens for the allies combined with diminishing prospects for Kiev have diminished support for Zelensky on both sides of the Atlantic. Backing Ukraine is no longer a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Instead, American and European officials are focusing more on their own peoples, and the importance of ending the conflict.

For instance, before Zelensky arrived the Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio was blunt: Kiev is going to have to negotiate and likely will lose territory. Accepting this outcome is in “America’s best interest,” he explained. ... ever more members of the foreign policy establishment recognize that Vance is right, even if they still won’t publicly admit reality.

Washington’s influential Kiev lobby is running out of options. Plans to disable the Russian economy flopped. Hopes to oust Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, democratize Russia, and even break up the Russian Federation proved even more fantastic. Demands that China abandon its partner were ignored. Pursuit of global backing against Moscow crashed and burned amid the West’s many hypocrisies, including support for Israel’s oppressive occupation and indifference to Gaza’s mass civilian casualties.

Hysterical warnings that a victorious Russia would next conquer Europe and perhaps the rest of the known world, failed to rouse the public, belied by Moscow’s difficulty in defeating Ukraine. Bizarre attempts to sell military aid to Kiev as a jobs-creation program for Americans failed miserably. After all, almost any expenditure on anything else in the US would provide a bigger economic boost than sending bombs to Europe.

Now Ukrainians are warning that if Americans don’t agree to write checks to and risk soldiers’ lives for Kiev, Ukrainians won’t like us. They might turn against us. And who knows what might happen then.. For instance, Denys Karlovskyi of the Royal United Services Institute warned:

A seeming failure of the Western allies to shield Ukraine from a second butcherous war is likely to make Ukraine’s population feel resentful and expended for the sake of ‘great powers’, just as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum is perceived by Ukrainians today. The task for NATO policymakers is to avoid making post-war Ukraine’s public sentiments grow anti-Western or, worse, isolationist. They must build a mutually beneficial security cooperation framework with Ukraine’s government and maintain current levels of Ukrainian public support for NATO and the E..U.

"https://www.theamericanconservative.com/americas-ukraine-problem/