Nobody will build a heat-pump system with an on/off control system like that because the performance will be awful. Certainly not an air-to-water system.
I think a lot of people, without meaning to be disrespectful of Ukrainian identity and sovereignty, looked at the conflict in the Donbas and Crimea and thought:
"well, this isn't really acceptable in terms of respecting settled borders but the reality is that at least a very substantial percentage of the local population does want to be part of Russia so it isn't the worst thing in the world and probably Putin will move troops into areas he de facto controls or slightly expand borders there".
That doesn't make those things ok but it does put in a long list of other conflicts where the on-the-ground reality is complicated.
Many of us also have mixed feelings of at least partial support about other re-arrangements of sovereignty whether that is ethnic separatism within a country with a quasi-federalist state like Spain (i.e. Basque or Catalan) or other cases like South Sudan or even Kosovo where NATO actively carved out an ethnic statelet by helping an organisation that for all its roots of legitimate popular support was at least... organised-crime adjacent.
The speech that Putin gave though was not about border adjustment but about a denial of any kind of Ukrainian nation identity or nationhood. He wasn't saying, "the Russia / Ukraine border should be 10 or 20 km West of where it is" which might be unacceptable to a hardline territorial integrist or to Ukraine but is within the normal bounds of nation state conflict, he was saying "there is no Ukraine at all, it's not a real nation, they have no right to any kind of state" and that crosses many, many lines that are not crossed by taking territory here or there.
Not trying to make taking "taking a province or two" look like acceptable behaviour but I think that it's important to put previous and current EU/NATO positions in the context of the full horror of what he is now proposing to do which is to permanently destroy a nation state. Even the Ukrainian government didn't really believe this was how it was going to go.
It's basically the smarter version of what Elizabeth Holmes did. If you're going to grift, play by the rules. It is not illegal to do what the Neumanns did, take dumb money and use it to enrich yourself while the company collapses as long as you don't lie and follow the rules.
If Holmes hadn't made the amateurish mistake of actually lying rather than just handwaving vaporware, and had managed to pull some liquidity out during later rounds into Theranos, she'd be rich and untouchable.
Remember, it's not illegal to be bad at business or technology and it's not illegal to be ridiculously optimistic to the point of delusion about the future. What is illegal is being "optimistic" about events which have already occurred.
As a result, they are smoking weed by the coast of the med and shopping for vineyards and Holmes is going to jail.