The question is simple: what place Ukrainians have in terms of self-sufficiency, value of their life, value of their views, claims, and thoughts? What are their rights to be listened to by everyone else and to be given a possibility to provide something unique and valuable?
They are the reason the Soviet Union was a near peer to the USA during the cold war. When the Soviet Union lost Ukraine they lost their engineering and manufacturing sectors.
Heck up until the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine was the one servicing all of Russia’s nukes.