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[Ultimately those weapons would wind up in Russian hands.

Just like the $80B of weapons left behind in Afghanistan.]

The government in Afghanistan was completely rotten. We funded it to the tune of $5b a year. We also spent billions on supporting our bases in country. Ultimately, we were almost 50% of its economy. When we bailed, that economy collapsed. We provide an annual stipend amounting to less than 0.5% of Ukraine’s economy. They’ve been fighting the Russians for almost a decade, spending large sums in the process. So far, the country is running fine. I think they’ll give a better account of themselves than the Afghans, at a fraction of the cost in US subsidies.

After WWII, Ukrainian rebels fought hard against the Soviets, despite a Soviet policy of large scale massacres against civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army#Spring_1945%E2%80%93late_1946
[After Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Soviet authorities turned their attention to insurgencies taking place in Ukraine and the Baltics. Combat units were reorganised and special forces were sent in. One of the major complications that arose was the local support the UPA had from the population.

Areas of UPA activity were depopulated. The estimates on numbers deported vary; officially Soviet archives state that between 1944 and 1952 a total of 182,543 people[94][95] were deported while other sources indicate the number may have been as high as to 500,000.[96]

Mass arrests of suspected UPA informants or family members were conducted; between February 1944 and May 1946 over 250,000 people were arrested in Western Ukraine.[97] Those arrested typically experienced beatings or other violence. Those suspected of being UPA members underwent torture; reports exist of some prisoners being burned alive. The many arrested women believed to be affiliating with the UPA were subjected to torture, deprivation, and rape at the hands of Soviet security in order to “break” them and get them to reveal UPA members’ identities and locations or to turn them into Soviet double-agents.[63] Mutilated corpses of captured rebels were put on public display.[73] Ultimately, between 1944 and 1952 alone as many as 600,000 people may have been arrested in Western Ukraine, with about one third executed and the rest imprisoned or exiled.[98]
Roman Shukhevych, the leader of the UPA

The UPA responded to the Soviet methods by unleashing their own terror against Soviet activists, suspected collaborators and their families. This work was particularly attributed to the Sluzhba Bezbeky (SB), the anti-espionage wing of the UPA. In a typical incident in Lviv region, in front of horrified villagers, UPA troops gouged out the eyes of two entire families suspected of reporting on insurgent movements to Soviet authorities, before hacking their bodies to pieces. Due to public outrage concerning these violent punitive acts, the UPA stopped the practice of killing the families of collaborators by mid-1945. Other victims of the UPA included Soviet activists sent to Galicia from other parts of the Soviet Union; heads of village Soviets, those sheltering or feeding Red Army personnel, and even people turning food in to collective farms. The effect of such terrorist acts was such that people refused to take posts as village heads, and until the late 1940s villages chose single men with no dependants as their leaders.[73]: 109

The UPA also proved to be especially adept at assassinating key Soviet administrative officials. According to NKVD data, between February 1944 and December 1946 11,725 Soviet officers, agents and collaborators were assassinated and 2,401 were “missing”, presumed kidnapped, in Western Ukraine.[73]: 113–114 In one county in Lviv region alone, from August 1944 until January 1945 Ukrainian rebels killed 10 members of the Soviet active and a secretary of the county Communist party, and also kidnapped four other officials. The UPA travelled at will throughout the area. In this county, there were no courts, no prosecutor’s office, and the local NKVD only had three staff members.[73]: 113–114

According to a 1946 report by Khrushchev’s deputy for West Ukrainian affairs A.A. Stoiantsev, out of 42,175 operations and ambushes against the UPA by Destruction battalions in Western Ukraine, only 10 percent had positive results – in the vast majority there was either no contact or the individual unit was disarmed and pro-Soviet leaders murdered or kidnapped.[73]: 123 Morale amongst the NKVD in Western Ukraine was particularly low. Even within the dangerous context of Soviet state service in the late-Stalin era, West Ukraine was considered to be a “hardship post”, and personnel files reveal higher rates of transfer requests, alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, and refusal to serve among NKVD field agents there at that time.[73]: 120

The first success of the Soviet authorities came in early 1946 in the Carpathians, which were blockaded from 11 January until 10 April. The UPA operating there ceased to exist as a combat unit.[99] The continuous heavy casualties elsewhere forced the UPA to split into small units consisting of 100 soldiers. Many of the troops demobilized and returned home, when the Soviet Union offered three amnesties during 1947–1948.[85]

By 1946, the UPA was reduced to a core group of 5–10 thousand fighters, and large-scale UPA activity shifted to the Soviet-Polish border. Here, in 1947, they killed the Polish Communist deputy defence minister General Karol Świerczewski. In spring 1946, the OUN/UPA established contacts with the Intelligence services of France, Great Britain and the USA.[100] ]

Note that they fought the Soviets basically without any material support from the West. It’s pretty clear why any right-thinking Ukrainian considers them heroes. They understood they faced certain defeat and certain death, but they fought on anyway.