In year 2000 Ukraine knew there will never be a war in Ukraine. In 2013 it still knew the same.

In 2013 Ukraine knew perfectly well that Poland will never attack it. Nor Hungary or Slovakia or Romania. And the most ridiculous thought was that Moldova would attack. Heh.

In 2013 Ukraine knew that if it was ever attacked by the aforementioned countries, the Russia would come for help.
In 2013 Ukrainians knew that the Russia has a powerful army.

Because they knew this, their army was a joke. They had tanks, but everything inside the tanks was stolen and sold on black market. “Military training” consisted of building huge “summer cottages” for the highest ranking officers. This made sense because there was no war to be seen. The only war there would ever be would be some Russian expeditional war, and the worse Ukrainian soldiers perform, the less likely they are to ever be sent to one of them. It became a virtue for the army to be bad.

There was no need to prepare for a war, therefore they didn’t.

And then the Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014. It could do that because there was nobody to oppose it (except far-right extremists funded by the Russia itself, which is otherwise a hilarious turn of events, but made less comfortable by the fact that far-right extremists are a very bad thing in the long run)

But yeah. It’s good that Sweden has now decided not to be Ukraine of 2013, after all.