"She is not Ukrainian anymore, and I see this," said Natalia Khmelnytska, 50, a teacher at School Number 15, where Spartz studied, and who lives in the apartment block where the congresswoman grew up. "We are disappointed. We are frustrated."

"At first we were very proud of her and we thought she wanted to support us," Khmelnytska added. "But now we see that politics and careers are higher than our interests."

In the past two years, eight graduates of School 15 have been killed fighting on the front lines. Russian strikes have broken 88 of the building's windows. Administrators set up a museum on the first floor to display evidence of the war collected by students: shell fragments, a piece of a Russian airplane, a dead Russian soldier's uniform.

Spartz's "no" vote was the latest twist in her transformation from a pro-Ukraine advocate who toured war wreckage in her hometown to a critic of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in line with the GOP's most right-wing camp.

In an email, she defended her vote, saying she is proud of her heritage but that it is "actually offensive and un-American to think that as an American my loyalty would not be to the people who elected me to represent them and to my family and children back home in Indiana, but to some foreign government in the country I left 24 years ago."

Spartz' district starts literally a couple handfuls of blocks north of where I live, but the difference between our representatives couldn't be more stark. It's one thing to criticize a government when a country isn't being threatened, but it's a whole other thing to vote to withhold funding for a nation fighting an existential defensive war due to your alleged concerns about its leadership and possible corruption when your own grandmother was trapped in a besieged city under constant shelling and bombing by an enemy cheering on those making their attempted conquest all the more easier for them, and all the more brutal for your fellow Ukrainians.