Hand sanitiser, in other words, is no help at all. The good intentions of Western charities can be measured by the metre when Bilyk walks past the pallets full of masks, PPE gear and other supplies meant to help against the pandemic. Other supplies are shipped east as fast as possible, but not these boxes.

“In Ukraine, COVID finished on February 24,” she says. While she is grateful for every donation, she cannot hide her frustration with some of the assumptions made about what she needs. Trucks arrive with hundreds of packs of medical supplies that are out of date, or with painkillers that expire within a month.

Bilyk, who still works as a dental surgeon two days each week, cannot be sure how long her warehouse can stay open. She and her husband, Andriy Nemyrovskyy, a food importer, set up their first warehouse within hours of the invasion. Yet their foundation, blandly called the Volunteering and Help Centre, has very little money to run a warehouse of 8000 square metres.

The truth is that donations are slowing as the war grinds on, even when the need for help is growing as the casualties mount. The strongest financial support comes from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, which helps transfer medical aid from Australia and elsewhere.

Donors clearly want clean hands. Some charities restrict themselves to humanitarian aid. But this is a dirty, brutal war. Mending wounds will not be enough if the savagery is not stopped. That means stopping Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president has poisoned his enemies on foreign soil, funded disinformation campaigns to divide the west, supported a militia that shot down Flight MH17 and killed all 298 people on board, given aid to a Syrian regime that choked its own people with chemical weapons, launched a war for territory against Georgia, completed the illegal annexation of Crimea, and unleashed terror on the civilians of Ukraine.

Even now, when Putin fires rockets on innocent victims, a fog of Ukraine fatigue settles over the West. People would rather not read about war crimes, but will erupt over culture wars. The media succumbs to the temptation of the trivial. Social media puts a premium on distraction.

Ukrainians express total confidence in their eventual victory, but they expect a long war. This is the US assessment. “There is a grinding war of attrition that is occurring in the Luhansk-Donbas region,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told a Pentagon press conference on July 19.

With Chinese President Xi Jinping watching to see if he can copy Putin in the straits of Taiwan, Australia has a stake in a Ukrainian victory. The debate in Australia will have to consider whether $388 million in military aid is enough.

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The question for Biden is whether the US will give Ukraine the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which can reach 300 kilometres compared to 85 kilometres for the HIMARS. Without more help, the conditions placed on Ukraine force it to fight with one hand behind its back; it is told not to fire on Russian positions that bombard Kharkiv, for instance, because that artillery is on Russian soil.

“Even if you don’t care about the moral aspect of this, supporting the people of Ukraine, you should care about your own security interest,” the NATO chief, Jens Stoltenberg, put it memorably last week.

“So therefore, you have to pay; pay for the support, pay for humanitarian aid, pay the consequences of the economic sanctions, because the alternative is to pay a much higher price later on. And then remember one thing: yes, we pay a price, but the price we pay, as the European Union, as NATO, is a price we can measure in currency, in money. The price they pay is measured in lives lost every day. So we should just stop complaining and step up and provide support, full stop.“

A Ukrainian soldier has a similar message for Australia.

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“We are the buffer between the free world and the autocratic world,” says Roman Mamont – his code name – in a recent meeting in Ukraine.

“We are succeeding, we are able to do this. We will never ask you guys to fight in our country for our cause. But with support we can save Ukraine. What we need to bring peace is to bring fear to the Russians.” What will bring that fear? Better weapons.

Russia is a renegade superpower, Putin is an agent of state terror. The West has the resources to ensure Russia and Putin fail on the fields of Ukraine. The inexorable logic is to use those resources to that end. Nobody will defeat Putin with clean hands.

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