Savile Row Suits, Ukrainian Graves

The West didn’t just abandon Ukraine, it commodified its suffering, outsourced its resistance, and let democracy rot while feeding speeches to the graveyard of promises.

Lviv, Ukraine — A city once brimming with hope, now wears the silence of abandonment like a funeral suit. I’ve returned to Ukraine once more, a country I have followed into fire since the first Russian boots tore through its borders. I was here in 2022, when the sirens were constant and the streets were emptied of children’s laughter. I came back in 2023, when there was still a song of hope in people’s voices. In 2024, that melody fell silent. Now, in 2025, even the echoes are gone.

A general overview shows the panoramic portrait of Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine, on Sunday, July 31, 2022. (VX Photo/ Vudi Xhymshiti)

This is my fourth year returning to a nation the West said it would never forsake. What I see is not the heroism of tidy speeches, nor the logic of strategy rooms, it is the broken back of a people left to fight a Goliath while the Davids of the free world hold on to their slings and whisper of logistics.

Lviv, closest to the European Union, should have been a sanctuary. A promise. In 2022, it was emptied out and boarded up, cardboard where windows should be, humanity hiding behind barricaded doors. And yet, there was spirit. A pulse. People would offer you shelter before you asked. They would give before being given to.

By 2023, that spirit had matured into something dangerously hopeful. The people had heard the West’s promises. They believed in words, in laws, in alliances. There was laughter in the cafés again. A belief that help was coming, that Europe and America were not merely onlookers but comrades.

Then came 2024. Neutrality seeped into their bones like winter. A look passed between strangers, not of solidarity, but of resignation. That slow corrosion of the soul is something no army can stop once it begins. And now, in 2025, I walk among them once again and what I see is nothing short of despair made human.

The faces I once knew are gaunt. Their light has dimmed, their eyes hollow with grief and fatigue. These are not simply Ukrainians. They are software engineers, architects, artists, civil servants, fathers, daughters. And they are being devoured. Not just by Russian artillery, but by Western indifference.

I met a civil engineer, a friend of years, who earns less than $1000 a month. The same job in Berlin or Brussels would earn him nearly €4,000. And yet he rebuilds what Russian bombs erase. Another acquaintance, an electrical engineer, earns a paltry €800 while paying rent for a flat to replace the home he lost. His parents are sick. The state has nothing left to give him. Neither, it seems, does the world.

Corporations, those polished engines of “Western values” pay Ukrainian workers a fraction of what they would in Milan or Manchester. This isn’t humanitarian aid. This is economic colonialism. Exploitation clothed in capitalist compassion. Ukraine, the brave, has become Ukraine, the bargain.

And yet, the greatest betrayal is not economic, it is moral. It is the betrayal of promises made and abandoned. Western leaders, former President Biden, who delivered words without will; Donald Trump, Putin’s ventriloquist dummy and a convicted felon now squatting in the White House; Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, whose silence echoes louder than bombs; President Macron, master of performative empathy; and Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s technocratic ghost of compassion, all parade themselves as defenders of democracy while letting Ukraine bleed into the soil. They wear Savile Row suits, ride in million-euro motorcades, and issue declarations as if diplomacy were a theatre. They have failed a people who were not just promised support, they were incited to believe in it. Not once, but repeatedly.

In 2014, Ukrainians overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, believing the West would stand with them. Instead, Crimea fell. In 2022, a full-scale invasion shocked the world and still the West hesitated. Weapons were drip-fed like morphine to a dying man. Enough to ease the pain. Never enough to heal.

What has the West done?

It has declared press conferences, not victories. It has issued statements, not air defences. It has sent dollars, but no decisive support. It has performed theatre while Ukraine bleeds out in the wings. This is not policy. It is cowardice dressed in protocol.

Western capitals are full of dry-eyed politicians who boast of resolve while avoiding risk. Who speak of unity, but fear the cost of action. They have turned Ukraine into a war that can’t be won and won’t be lost, a war sustained just enough to ensure that peace never arrives. A war that is not allowed to end, because ending it would require courage.

And the Ukrainian people?

A Ukrainian mother mourns the loss of her son, a fallen soldier, during a funeral near the Kharkiv region in 2022. Her grief, private and immeasurable, echoes the heartbreak of a nation left to endure alone. (VX Photo/ Vudi Xhymshiti)

They are imprisoned by their own patriotism. Men cannot leave. Soldiers are spent. Even generals are weeping, quite literally weeping, because they lack what their allies promised. Ammunition. Defence. Dignity.

It is difficult to say this, but I must. If this betrayal continues, Ukrainians, desperate, exhausted, and disillusioned may turn Eastward. Not from ideology, but from isolation. Not from love of Russia, but from abandonment by Europe. The moral catastrophe would not be theirs. It would be ours.

We in the West like to tell ourselves we are on the side of freedom. But freedom without sacrifice is just rhetoric. As a journalist, I walk with the people. I see their funerals. I hold the hands of survivors. I witness what the polished corridors of Brussels, Paris, London and Washington have chosen to ignore.

The next time a Western leader claims we are “doing everything we can,” ask: are we? Or are we merely doing enough to feel clean while leaving Ukrainians to the slaughter?

I am ashamed. Ashamed not of the Ukrainians, but of the institutions I report for. The democracies I was taught to believe in. They do not represent my values. They do not carry my conscience. If Ukraine falls, not just its borders but its spirit, the West will be guilty not of negligence, but of betrayal.

And history, though often late, does not forget.

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