It isn’t devotion, it is support, as the European underdog that was struggling to come out of the dark ages of Soviet domination and into modernity somehow manages to fight off the Russian/North Korean Army forces being trained by Red China and armed by Iran, it is pretty impressive and unexpected.
Americans also like to support our side in wars against our evil enemies, obviously not all Americans, as we see from the Vietnam war and the Ukraine war, Russia always has its supporters.
If their goal was modernity, they weren't doing a very good job of it. Even backwards, Muslim, war-torn Bosnia managed a (slightly) higher per-capita GDP in the 2010s than pre-war Ukraine did.