Equally awful is Kiev’s decision to maintain a relationship with the Azov battalion, an ultranationalist paramilitary group of around 400 men that uses Nazi salutes and insignia. To anyone familiar with eastern Ukraine’s bloody history during World War II, allowing the Azov battalion to fight in the region is a bit like sponsoring a Timothy McVeigh Appreciation Night in Oklahoma City. It does nothing but infuriate the local population and provide Mr. Putin with yet another opportunity to shed the mantle of invader and position himself as a protector.

The impact of World War II, or, as most people there call it, The War, on eastern Ukrainian consciousness cannot be understated. My childhood in the northeast city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in the 1980s was surrounded by The War, 40 years after it ended. Every family — Russian, Ukrainian, Roma, Jewish — had ghost relatives who had vanished or perished. One of my earliest memories is of asking my father where the mortar holes pockmarking the outside of our apartment block had come from; one of my father’s earliest memories is of fleeing Kharkov mere hours before the Nazis invaded the city. Eastern Ukrainians today, especially the older generations, respond to swastikas and wolfsangel runes — Nazi symbols now used by Ukrainian ultranationalists — about as well as African-Americans respond to burning crosses.

Mr. Putin and the Russian news media say that western Ukrainians in Mr. Poroshenko’s government are neo-Nazis. The West denies these claims, averring that there are no neo-Nazi elements in the Kiev government. Both are wrong. The Kiev government and the armies fighting in eastern Ukraine contain a small minority of neo-Nazi ultranationalists. To eastern Ukrainians, however, even one is too many.

Washington and the Western media have largely ignored the negative ramifications of Kiev’s actions. The State Department has said nothing about the pension freeze’s effect on the local population of eastern Ukraine; reports of the Azov battalion’s use of Nazi insignia have not been addressed in any meaningful manner. Mr. Putin’s greatest weapon of all may be the West’s refusal to speak directly to the people of eastern Ukraine. When I talk to family friends still living in Kharkiv, they ask me, “Why does the West label us as enemies?”

It seems the West has forgotten the lessons of its own history. At the end of the Cold War in 1989, Communism collapsed, leaving unrest and uncertainty in its wake. In that moment of chaos, the people of Eastern Europe turned their gazes westward. This happened not by accident, but because of decades of public diplomacy — from “Ich bin ein Berliner” to “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” to nightly broadcasts by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which constantly reassured those behind the Iron Curtain that the West had not forgotten them. That year my family was one of many that fled eastern Ukraine for Vienna, and later the United States.