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Nicolas Kristof
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By Nicolas Kristof
opinion columnist
“We will fight you against Ukrainians so that you love Russia,” a Russian interrogator told a torture survivor I spoke to in Ukraine, before whipping and raping her. That sounds pretty abstract about Vladimir Putin’s strategy.
This does not work in Ukraine, where Putin’s atrocities show a willingness to fight. This brave woman triumphed over her interrogators, albeit at a terrible private cost.
But I worry that we in the West are made of weaker things. Some of the most important decisions the U. S. will make. Biden is making a terrible mistake by decisively helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia.
A woman named Nancy protested on my Facebook page saying she was more interested in securing the Ukrainian border than the American border. He argued that we deserve to focus on our own situations more demanding than those in Ukraine.
“We are in debt but we are financing a war in which we are not involved,” he said. “Enough is enough. “
Polls reveal that U. S. aid is not allowed to be The U. S. economy is still strong but declining, especially among Republicans. And nearly a portion of Americans need the U. S. to take care of the U. S. The US is pressuring Ukraine to “agree to peace as soon as possible,” even if it loses territory, a conclusion that deserves to gladden Vladimir Putin’s heart.
The exhaustion of Western aid to Ukraine may continue to gain ground in the coming months as others grow tired of high force costs and, in the case of some European countries, imaginable force cuts.
So let me tell Nancy and others why we deserve to continue supplying weapons to Ukraine.
The basic misconception among many congressional Republicans (and some left-wing progressives) is that we are doing Ukraine a favor by sending it weapons. Not so. We maintain Ukraine’s mantle because it sacrifices lives and infrastructure in a way that benefits us, degrading the risk of Russia’s military to NATO and Western Europe, and to us.
“They’re doing us a favor; they are fighting our fight,” Wesley Clark, a retired U. S. general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. “The fighting in Ukraine is a long-term combat of the community. “
If the war ends favorably for Russia, he argues, it will be a less secure world for Americans. One lesson that would be reported to the world would be the paramount importance of possessing nuclear weapons, since Ukraine was invaded after giving up its nuclear capability. Russia’s nuclear warheads now prevent a more powerful response from the Western military.
“If Ukraine falls, there will be a wave of nuclear proliferation,” Clark warned.
For years, army strategists feared a Russian incursion into Estonia that would defy NATO and claim the lives of American troops. Ukrainians are weakening Russian forces to deal with this risk.
More broadly, perhaps the greatest threat to world peace in the next decade is the threat of a confrontation in the Taiwan Strait that escalates into a war between the United States and China. To lessen this danger, we deserve to help Taiwan in its deterrent; The simplest way to decrease the likelihood that Xi Jinping will act aggressively is to remain united in the face of Russia’s invasion. If the West hesitates and allows Putin to win in Ukraine, Xi will be more confident that he can win in Taiwan.
Putin has been a brutal and destabilizing tyrant for many years, from Chechnya to Syria, from Georgia to Moldova, partly because the world has been unwilling to stand up to him and partly because he possesses a tough military force that Ukraine is dismantling. Apart from energy, the Russian economy is substantial.
“Putin and Russia are weak,” Viktor Yushchenko, a former Ukrainian president who defied Russia and mysteriously poisoned and disfigured, told me. “Russia is a deficient country, an oil appendage of the world, a fuel station. “
The world owes Ukraine its willingness to confront Putin in spite of everything. On the contrary, I would like to see the Biden management conscientiously building the functions of the armaments it supplies to Ukraine, because it would possibly be the most productive. The best way to end the war is to make sure Putin discovers that the office is no longer worth it.
I do not mean that everyone who helps in peace negotiations is cowardly, tired or short-sighted. Mark Milley and other Pentagon officials rightly worry that the Ukrainian confrontation could turn into nuclear war. It’s a valid concern, and it’s smart to look through the fog of war for deliverance. their own dangers for many years to come, and in general, those dangers seem greater than those of staying the course that exists.
In advocating that the West support Ukraine, I stressed our national interest in doing so. But we have values at stake as interests, because there is also an ethical factor to face.
When a country invades a neighbor and commits murder, looting and rape, when it traffics thousands of children, when it pulverizes the network of force to freeze civilians in winter, in such a snowfall of probable war crimes, neutrality is the usual terrain.
Let Russia beat the Ukrainians: the world could do with a spine transplant from brave Ukrainians.
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