Ukraine: The Need to Support and the Perils of Support

The entire world should be standing with Ukraine, but the developed democracies of the world have a certain obligation. There is no way democratic countries of the world can look upon a country that has been aspiring to join the democratic world being invaded by an authoritarian regime and then turn away without violating their own professed ideals. The developed democracies of the world have the resources to provide that help. There is then no real excuse for them to do nothing. The question becomes what can be done, and what can be done without causing more harm than good.

The challenge is that sadly that support is not an easy goal to fully achieve. The man leading the invasion has enough nuclear weapons to personally destroy not only human civilization but most of the life on earth that has struggled billions of years to survive. A wrong move cannot only lead to the deaths of billions of humans through fire, radiation, and starvation, but it could lead to the end of all of the beauty of this world. The cold death of all the birds falling from the world's poisoned skies. The bodies of dolphins floating up from poisoned oceans. Every creature you've ever looked upon with wonder being killed and made extinct at the hands of humanity.

Good intentions that lead to the death of all of the people, land, and creatures of Ukraine and the rest of the world are not helpful to anyone.

There are calls for direct military intervention by NATO in Ukraine including for no fly zones. Emotionally, I get it. It is painful to watch Ukraine suffer when we know we have tools that could counter the specific actions being inflicted on Ukraine right now including intercepting missiles and planes raining death from the sky. But direct NATO confrontation with the Russian military is war. It is war between nuclear armed NATO and nuclear armed Russia. Again then, we're dealing with all the lives of all the planet's people and creatures. We have to do a cold, hard evaluation of what situations can justify ending everything we hold dear on the planet not for a hundred or even a thousand years, but forever. Again, if we end up with everyone in Ukraine dead, there is no hope for a better future for them as there is no future for them.

That doesn't mean that we do nothing. Putin has played a dirty game with his Little Green Men and his propaganda attempts at dividing the United States and the West internally and with each other. He has worked to inflame divisions within the US to weaken the United States. He has encouraged those to power in the West who would weaken democracy and divide democracies from one another. He has used his private mercenary Wagner Group to cause death and chaos outside his borders while being able to claim that they have nothing to do with the Russian state. In doing so he has made these tactics fair game against him.

Are there now Little Green Men of the world's democracies operating in Ukraine? If not, I would hope they arrive soon. Is there a Beethoven Group or Bach Group financed by a Ukrainian oligarch who can claim no ties to the Ukrainian state working against the Russian invasion in Ukraine? If so, on what grounds could Putin object?

Openly, we should resume FDR's Arsenal of Democracy project. We can't fight openly and directly in the war without giving cause for open warfare between NATO and Russia. We can send as many arms to the democratically elected Zelensky and his forces as they can absorb. We can share the awesome real time intelligence of the NATO alliance with Zelensky to give him the advantage of knowing Russian moves.

We can make the consequences of Putin's decision economically painful, and we've seen the democracies of the world, from North America, to Europe, to Japan, South Korea, and Australia standing together to do so.

We can send the aid and materials the people of Ukraine need to stand up for their cause. We need to be prepared to offer the aid their wounded and fallen will need as they fight. We need to make it clear that we will help rebuild a democratic, European Ukraine in the end.