The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one they are magnificently disproving on the battlefield. - Anna Reid

In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovych’s flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actions had the opposite effect.

Ukraina is literally translated as “on the edge” or “borderland”, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th, between Russia and Austria through the 19th, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it had never been an independent state.

Being ‘Ukrainian’, for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian.