There is some aspect of the Ukraine-Russia subject that is inherently ambiguous.
When I first got to the Ukraine I was more than shocked to discover that no one was happy about the fall of the USSR. No one. They may have not liked totalitarianism [which the USSR was], but they liked chaos even less. The West however turned a deaf ear to the attempts of the Ukraine to join the West. Probably because of the well known tendencies. Even after being there for some period [that I think was long enough for me to gain some familiarity with the situation], I still have little idea of what the West should do. And besides that, as David Bronson [my learning partner] mentioned to me once, it seems that Russia is becoming more of a bastion of Western Values even more than the USA.
But still it is hard to know, since the political part of Ukraine still openly is trying to integrate with Europe and the USA.
One thing is clear, the people and the politics are two very different things.
The situation in most Ukrainian cities was such that after the USSR, and you asked people when was better, they almost always said things were better in the time of the USSR. But like the time of the civil war of the Whites against the Reds, neighbors would kill each other when they thought their neighbor was on the other side. {I knew the people this happened to.} So even if people would prefer to be back to the way things were during the USSR, they dare not say so openly. --Except to someone like me that they knew would not tell their neighbors about their feelings. There however were exceptions--people that told me if Russia would show up there, they would take a rifle and shoot them.
So what you have is a sort of Hidden Civil War--hidden because it is unknown and hidden from public view. And the Russians were well aware of this from at least back to around 2012.
