Maybe the Ukrainians remember the decades of Soviet repression
When the Germans invaded the USSR the regions of modern Ukraine most enthusiastic to collaborate were ex Polish lands who weren't affected by the Holodomor and were treated as 2nd class citizens by Warsaw, whereas the bulk of partisans and future red army volunteers who joined up after the Soviets recaptured their lands came from the parts of Ukraine that had spent the past two decades under Soviet rule.
The hatred is not the fault of the Soviets. Its roots lie in West Ukraine/Galacia being converted to Catholicism by the Poles and viewing themselves as a seperate ethnic group (like how Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks or Han and Hui would all be the same were it not for their religious affiliations).
These sentiments would end up getting inflamed a thousand fold by the Austrians who wanted to weaken the Pan Slavic movements in their frontier, it grew violent in the years leading up to ww2 and spawned men like Bandera who would go on to commit atrocities, and it reached its final form after the dissolution of the USSR when the Ukrainian expats the west smuggled out of the Soviet Union (after helping them for a decade continue fighting the Soviets despite previously serving the Nazis) returned and used foreign NGO funding to help them spread their hatred all across what we call Ukraine, even into lands like Kharkov or Odessa which in a world without Lenin's arbitrary border redrawing would be as indisputably Russian as Trondheim is Norwegian.
This isn't some war that was destined to happen over past wrongs, this whole debacle is a prime example of how propaganda can cause brothers to kill eachother.
>The true culture war is not between Fags and non Fags, but between Western Liberal Democracy and Eastern Nonliberal Monarchy
Romania just cancelled its election, Georgia's president is trying to trying to do the same, Germany may ban its biggest opposition party, France threw its nations political sphere into chaos to prevent a center right canidate from winning, Italy elected a right wing leader who immediately chickened out of all of her promises out of fear of reprisal, Spain is led by Socialists who are increasingly acting authoritarian, Britain is effectively a one party state where its illegal to go against any policy in a serious way and all "parties" only argue about how far they should go in any direction, Canada sent mounted police to crush protesting truckers after looking the other way when churches were burnt, Austria handicapped the ability of its right to act in parliament, and ALL of those were just examples I could recall at the top of my head without needing to look them up.
The West isn't democratic. Accuse Russia all you want in that regard but please don't pretend that the modern West is a bastion of freedom.