The writer is Canada’s special representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine

It is time to change how we think about Ukraine. Forget about saving Ukraine; the fact is that we need Ukraine to save us. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24 2022, we have cast Ukraine in the role of righteous victim — noble, blameless and inevitably overpowered. We have believed it was right, and we have assumed it would lose, at least without extraordinary effort from us.

This framing flattered Ukraine’s western allies: it put us at the centre of the story. And, at least at the start of the war, it offered a morality tale that roused and inspired democracies that had been exhausted and demoralised by the pandemic. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has always been right: this is a conflict between light and darkness.