the war is not over.
Golden words. It's possible, still, that the Ukrainians will suffer some cruel blowback from their admittedly very successful PR campaign of the first month of the war. Already every rebellious teenager on Reddit is trolling the pious adults for buying into an enormous amount of clear fakes (largely because modern kids are actually better than adults at information hygiene). The same way my nephew thought it was funny to support Trump and wear MAGA hats - for the simple reason that it got huge reactions from his politically correct family - but whom we later looked at with much deeper curiosity once Trump was elected. Some large part of the population thought it was a good idea to bash Trump on the daily shows for his clownish behavior and continuously opine on the absurdity of the mere idea of him getting elected, but all it did was set us up further for our own harsh reckoning with how little we understood of what was going on. Modern people are conditioned to search for self-gratifying narratives on short time scales, and are poorly equipped for when reality does not match.
That, and other examples have made me sincerely believe you can use kids, to an extent, as a sort of barometer of what's in the popular undercurrent (maybe because their intellectual development accords to that of the majority of the population). They don't understand anything about Ukraine, or Trump in example, but they understand that there is something to be won in this case by adopting the contrarian stance.
If you are able to read Ukrainian/Russian - consider using the search function on some popular Ukrainian websites for terms like «Дебальцево» and «Иловайск», with publication dates around 2014 and 2015. Look at how the narrative was formed in the lead up to those military disasters, and in how fantastic a fashion reality finally collided with scrupulously manufactured fiction of growing success.
Guess who Ukrainians blamed most? The same people that throughout the early months of the conflict in 2014 consistently announced that Ukrainian forces were about to reach the Russian border. Nearly the entire military command of Ukraine was sacked in the aftermath. The president's popularity rating collapsed and never rebounded.
My feeling is that this time they will be kinder to their own people, and instead direct their anger at the West. Indeed, Ukrainians fought heroically, and resisted to 150% of the level anyone expected of them. They did what they could. So they will likely blame the West for not doing enough and for feeding them with false promises in their moment of need. Putin, after all, is a mad dog and there's no sense being upset with him. However, the failed Mig 29 transfers, and then the comical S-300 transfers will be remembered as bitter humiliations. For all the potential miscalculations on Putin's part, this victory he has already won. Ukrainians are completely disillusioned with the very ideas of European solidarity that they went to the Maidan with in 2014.
I understand if Germans and Poles may not like to hear this, given the huge amount of refugees these countries are hosting - but truly - the gratitude will be limited and short lived, while the resentment will stay for long. This is whether all of Ukraine is occupied, or if only the Donbass and Kherson republics.