PHILADELPHIA — From her home in Phoenixville, Natalia Korobka tracks daily developments on the war in Ukraine, where her brother is fighting on the front lines and her mother is under shelling.

“It’s devastating to watch how your country is torn apart,” said Korobka, a mother of three who moved to the United States with her husband in 2015 and has since watched the conflict between her native country and Russia escalate dramatically with the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

As she joined hundreds of fellow Ukrainian Americans — the Philadelphia region is home to one of the nation’s largest Ukrainian populations — and their supporters outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday to mark the third anniversary of that invasion, Korobka held a poster bearing a question on many of their minds: “Ukraine is holding the line. Will the U.S. keep its promise?”

While America has backed Ukraine in the war against Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, the future of that alliance is facing new uncertainty as President Donald Trump’s administration meets with Russia about ending the war — conversations that have so far excluded Ukraine.

After Trump suggested last week that Ukraine was to blame for Russia’s invasion, the U.S. on Saturday pushed to kill a United Nations resolution faulting Russia for the war, instead submitting its own version that didn’t assign blame for the conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Doubts over America’s commitment to Ukraine colored Sunday’s rally outside the Art Museum, where speakers condemned Trump’s apparent pivot toward Russia and called on Americans to express outrage at the prospect of their country siding with Putin over a fellow democracy.

“We cannot cave under Putin’s demands. ... This is not what American people stood for,” said Iryna Mazur, the honorary consul of Ukraine to Philadelphia, addressing rallygoers gathered in front of the museum, many with blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags wrapped around their shoulders. Down the museum’s steps, people unfurled a long flag, holding it aloft across multiple rows.

“I am asking you, don’t be silent,” Mazur told the crowd, urging them to call their elected representatives. “Stand up for Ukraine.”

U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Montgomery County Democrat, said that Russia had committed “a series of war crimes. You know that, and the world knows that.” She called on Trump to reverse course — “a course of American weakness, a course of betrayal” — and “call out the brutal dictator that is Putin.”

Some other speakers expressed fears about America’s commitment to its own democracy, and what any erosion of that system here would mean for democracies around the world.

“If the institutions of American democracy are destroyed, there is no Ukraine,” said Mary Kalyna, a local Ukrainian American activist. Describing how her father fought against the Soviets and Nazis in World War II while her mother was taken by the Nazis to work in Germany, and her grandparents were sent to Siberia after the war, Kalyna said her story was “tragically common” among Ukrainians.

“We have suffered all this and more — generations of genocide, war, occupation ... most of it at the hands of one aggressor. The aggressor that America now refuses to call an aggressor,” Kalyna said.

Historically, many Ukrainian Americans have voted Republican based on the party’s “strong stance against Russian aggression,” Kalyna said. Republicans should be reminded of that, she said, and “can take back their party from the cult that has destroyed it.”

In the crowd, Rada Dubashinsky held a poster that read “Republicans used to defeat evil empires, not make excuses.” Beside the message was Ronald Reagan’s face and the former president’s famous line from his 1987 speech calling on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to take down the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

“This is exactly what I feel,” said Dubashinsky, who came to the U.S. from Ukraine 30 years ago and lives in Warwick Township. Dubashinsky, who identifies as a Republican, said she wanted to do all she could “to ensure that America stands by” its support for Ukraine.

After the museum speeches, the crowd marched down the Parkway to City Hall, escorted by police. With Ukrainian flags flying, marchers chanted: “Make Russia pay” and “Russia is a terrorist state.” The crowd paused at the Ukrainian flag on the Parkway to sing the country’s national anthem.

Among the marchers were Natalia Omelchenko, her husband, Roman, and their 12-year-old daughter, Oleksandra. The family came to Philadelphia a year and a half ago from Donetsk, after being forced to flee their native city in 2014.

“We would like to say this message: Ukraine is not for sale,” Natalia Omelchenko said, adding that “we can’t even believe what Trump says.”

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