Ukraine won’t give up its freedom to putin — will we surrender ours to complacency?
If we allow a world where nuclear blackmail succeeds and wars of aggression go unchecked, the countdown to a military draft — first in Europe, then in the U.S. — will have begun.
On November fifth, everything changed. And yet, nothing changed.
While Americans voted in what’s been billed as the most consequential election of our time, November fifth was a day predictably, horrifically marked by the death and devastation Russia brought to Ukraine — largely unseen, unheard, and unnoticed in the most powerful country on Earth.
Moscow’s criminal war of aggression, coupled with nuclear blackmail, is a century-defining event — far more consequential than any political shifts in the U.S.
Make no mistake: it has already reshaped not only Europe but the entire world in ways we scarcely grasp. The era of ‘long peace,’ with its unprecedented prosperity and stability, has ended — not only due to Russia’s revanchism, countless war crimes, and success in drawing allies like North Korea and Iran into its war, but because the Free World let it go unchecked for too long.
On November fifth, we rushed to the polls, while Russia bombed another peaceful city in Ukraine, as happens day after day. Six people were killed — someone’s son, brother, wife, granddaughter. Twenty-three more were injured. Their “crime”? Being Ukrainian, refusing Russian occupation, daring to hope for basic freedoms we so easily take for granted.
It’s been over a decade since Russia first violated Ukraine’s sovereignty. The Free World’s inadequate responses and broken promises have steadily, perhaps irreparably, eroded the global security architecture. Now, it’s crumbling beneath us. Yet we look away, hoping for the best.
But hope is not a strategy, and if we continue with half-measures, we’ll pay a price far greater than we can imagine.
Elections in America come around every four years, but the true course of this century — for the U.S. and all of humanity — hinges on what Neville Chamberlain once presciently called “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” a line he used to describe the world’s greatest war before it unfolded.
By deterring ourselves and showing restraint in the face of blatant aggression, we aren’t signaling wisdom. We’re signaling disinterest, hypocrisy, and weakness.
This isn’t alarmism. Look at the trajectory: 1999, Russia invaded Chechnya. 2008, Georgia. 2014, Russian troops without insignia took over Ukrainian land in Crimea. In a tacit act of complicity, we pretended to believe Putin’s denials. Our complacency, passivity, and indecision are the fuels that power aggression of tyrants.
When Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s borders en masse on February 24, 2022, we had no right to be surprised. We were wrong not to have done more to prevent it, and we have no right to believe this unprovoked war of conquest doesn’t affect us. Pretending otherwise — hoping it will simply resolve itself — is reckless delusion. Ukraine is paying an immense price today, but we must stop taking its bravery for granted. If the Free World continues down this path, we, too, will soon be called to make ultimate sacrifices in defense of freedom.
No rational analysis grounded in historical precedent can explain — or justify — the Russia-related policy choices made in Western capitals over the past two decades.
If we go back to 2021, a year right before Russia’s full scale invasion, the U.S., Europe, and our allies accounted for half the global economy. Russia? Barely 2%. Russian military spending was $66 billion — a rounding error compared to NATO’s $1.2 trillion.
Now in 2024, Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, put it plainly: “Putin is spending $140 billion while we struggle to promise fifty. We are basically sending him the message, ‘We won’t stop you,’ so he won’t stop. But if we allocated $800 billion, he would be forced to rethink. Yes, we could afford it. And yes, it would be cheaper than letting him carry on.”
$800 billion sounds like a big number, but it’s meaningless unless we’re honest about the alternative. If a terrorist state starts an unprovoked war, subverts our global institutions, flashes Geneva convention down the toilet, and profits from such egregious actions, while the Free World does little, we will enter a new era of unsecurity — a world where wars of aggression are no longer taboo. A world where nuclear blackmail has worked is one where the proliferation of doomsday weaponry is all but inevitable.
U.S. defense spending of roughly one trillion a year currently stands at 3.5% of GDP, a fraction of what it was during the Cold War, when annual military budgets hovered around 10% of GDP for two decades. Over a similar timeframe, the costs of tripling defense expenditures would reach $40 trillion in the U.S. alone — a staggering figure surpassing America’s national debt of $35 trillion.
By deterring ourselves and showing restraint in the face of blatant aggression, we aren’t signaling wisdom. We’re signaling disinterest, hypocrisy, and weakness. The Kremlin reads our dithering as permission. The longer we hesitate, the more dangerous the world becomes.
“Even though we have a lot of strength, it doesn’t mean we want to fight all our lives, because the price is too high! The war takes the best of us, but we are not ready to give our freedom to this fucking terrorist putin” President Zelensky explained on NBC’s meet the press.
Americans, regardless of politics, share a stake in halting this cycle. This isn’t about picking sides on a partisan issue; it’s about standing up for a world where aggressors face consequences. The Free World needs to stand tall — not just for Ukraine’s sake, but for our own.
A version of this article first appeared in Kyiv Independent on Nov 8, 2024
