Three years ago, the war in Ukraine was new to Americans.

I was writing about a group of immigrants raising funds to buy medical supplies for their homeland, aided by enthusiastic supporters in Annapolis.

Something Olha Radchenko told me, sitting on a porch one night before selling T-shirts for the cause, has stuck with me.

“It’s either the whole world will win, or it’s going to be Russia,” she said.

I was reminded of this by President Donald Trump. He disagrees.

His detestable abuse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week in the Oval Office and his lies about the brutal Russian invasion are a historic embarrassment.

The worst part may be this. What if, in his blunt-force-trauma style, Trump is right about the need for a jarring change of direction?

What if the budding Republican autocrat is correctly assessing that European allies no longer hold the importance they did in the 20th century and that moving closer to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin prevents a deeper embrace with our 21st-century rival, China?

“You’re gambling with World War III,” Trump told Zelenskyy.

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen doesn’t believe Trump is thinking that deeply about foreign policy.

The Maryland Democrat took to the Senate floor Wednesday night and called on his colleagues to reaffirm a resolution unanimously passed two years ago stating that Russia is guilty of crimes against humanity.

He failed. Thursday morning, he said Trump doesn’t have a grand strategy, just a wrecking ball.

“This is about destroying the U.S.-built world order and the principles and values that stand behind it,” he said. “That’s what this is about.”

I caught up with Radchenko this week. I wanted to ask her about that White House ambush and how she’s faring after three years of war.

“We showed our courage. We showed how strong we are,” she said. “Unfortunately, we keep losing people, and we just need to agree to something to stop this war.”

In 2022, Radchenko was a fitness trainer in the Washington area who volunteered with a nonprofit created by émigrés to buy nonlethal aid.

Annapolis proved sympathetic. Then-Gov. Larry Hogan led a rally on the State House steps, intoning Slava Ukraini — glory to Ukraine — with a Ukrainian flag draped behind him.

Smaller versions fluttered around the city. Supporters invited people to “Stand with Ukraine,” and maybe buy a T-shirt. One was emblazoned with the final words of border guards facing the invading fleet, “Russian Warship, Go F--- Yourself.”

You don’t see the flags or the defiantly profane T-shirts anymore. The nonprofit has gone silent, its members wandering off to other ways of helping.

After learning about the Future for Ukraine Foundation, Radchenko began volunteering. It brings soldiers too mutilated to be operated on at home to the United States for surgery and prosthetics.

“Either it’s high amputation like hip, or it’s amputation of the arm at the end, because technologies are just still growing in Ukraine,” she said. “We were doing that here, and one amputation can cost an average $100,000.”

She started by picking up soldiers at the airport and driving them to hospitals. As Future for Ukraine got busier — more casualties — she started working in physical therapy with the soldiers.

The first cases were the toughest, but as flights continued to land, Radchenko learned to deal with the impact of their injuries.

“The main thing to make it more emotionally stable is to take it as the mission that you help people,” she said.

Eventually, Radchenko became so involved that she took a job as secretary of the foundation. She stayed in involved after moving to New York.

All that may have prepared her for Trump’s backhand to Zelenskyy on Feb. 28, the day the Ukrainian leader was supposed to sign a deal for half his country’s mineral rights.

She’s proud that Zelenskyy stood up to Trump, but the argument confirmed what she’s started to believe.

“If we’re gonna keep trying to say how strong we are, that we’re ready to fight, we’re just gonna lose all the people that we have in our country,” she said. “Nobody will be left.”

Realpolitik might be the most charitable term for Trump‘s graceless mess — making allies for the moment and the circumstances, then casting them aside when times and events change. Lies — “You should have never started it,” Trump told the Ukrainian leader — to make facts fit his actions goes right along with that.

Van Hollen called it “the great betrayal” on the Senate floor. His attempt to recreate unity failed.

U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker shot down the war crimes resolution, saying the administration needs space to bring about peace.

“It is time for those of us in the political realm who are not part of this negotiation to be silent,” the Mississippi Republican said.

Van Hollen doesn’t see a plan for lasting peace, nor the sense in antagonizing Canada, threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal or voting with Russia and North Korea at the United Nations on a Ukraine resolution. He sees no reason to be silent.

“This is not some genius master plan,” he said Thursday. “This has nothing to do with America first, this has to do with America in retreat.”

It may not be possible to put the world back together when Trump is done. Losing influence will likely make us less secure and less economically strong.

So, Van Hollen will continue to work from the minority in Congress, protest Trump’s actions and support lawsuits challenging his overreach.

He didn’t offer any ideas for what replaces Trump’s dog-eat-dog worldview when the president is gone.

Radchenko doesn’t know either. But she knows what must come next.

Ending the war. How remains the question.

“America needs to help to solve this problem,” she said. “It’s going to be a small puzzle in a big chain of the potential conflicts — whole world conflicts — and it all needs to be solved.”