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Ukraine was an impoverished third world country struggling to somehow recover from a century of brutally repressive communist rule.

Most of the population lived in the ruins of Soviet housing projects.

On the whole, people looked depressed and somewhat hopeless.

In a million years I never would have believed they could resist a Russian army for more than a heartbeat.

What I did not know THEN was how incredibly incompetent and corrupt Putin's Potemkin military actually was.

As it turns out, outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin's Russia is a primitive. tribal 18th century serf society... and probably worse off than Ukraine.

God only knows what Putin will do to the poor Ukrainians if the West abandons their defense. Many will be simply executed and many many more will be off to the gulags.

My heart bleeds for the friends I met many years ago. The lucky ones are probably already dead.