Just before five a.m. on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin made an ominous address to the world. In a way, it was expected. By December 2021, the Russian president had amassed almost 200,000 troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine, and officials in Washington and elsewhere were convinced that Russia had plans for significant aggressive moves against Ukraine.
Moscow had for months denied any such plans, despite satellite images revealing the truth. By February 24, doubt and debate were useless. Putin declared that he had given Russian forces the green light “to conduct a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify” the regime at Kyiv.
“It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory,” Putin assured the world. “We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force.”
Hours earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, aware that Russian forces were mobilizing for an offensive, made a final plea. “Do Russians want war?” he asked. “I would like to know the answer.”
The Ukrainian president, clean-shaven, donning his black suit, white shirt, and black dress tie, railed against Putin’s “special operation” to free the country. “You are being told this is a plan to free the people of Ukraine,” the president said. “But the Ukrainian people are free.” Zelenskyy made clear that if attacked, Russian troops would see Ukrainian faces, not their backs.
Minutes following Putin’s address, Russian forces invaded Ukraine by air, land, and sea. Explosions rang from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west to Odessa in the south, Kharkiv and Sumy to the east, and the capital, Kyiv. Air raid sirens echoed throughout cities. By dawn, Europe was ground zero for the deadliest conflict on the continent since Adolf Hitler marched Nazi killers into Poland in 1939.
Throughout the world, people joined in condemning the Kremlin’s brazen violation of the UN Charter. From New York to Berlin, freedom-loving citizens filled the streets marching and shouting against an unprovoked war of conquest. Disapproving Russians protested in St. Petersburg and Moscow, with many being grabbed, beaten, and thrown into unmarked prison buses.
Now, one year later, Putin’s war rages on and has inflicted massive devastation on Ukraine. Thriving cities, neighborhoods, and critical infrastructure have been reduced to rubble. Thousands of civilians are dead and the estimated troop casualties on both sides number around 100,000. According to the UN, more than ten million have fled Ukraine since the start of the war. Daily fighting continues, and Russia is estimated to have more than 95% of its military force inside Ukraine.
Despite escalations in the war, there seems to be a growing lethargy in the world, with many even suggesting an abandonment of Ukraine altogether. That would be a mistake.
At stake are the natural rights of human beings, notably self-determination. The Ukrainian people, as former President Obama wrote, “chose a path of sovereignty, self-determination, and democracy.” Putin is trying to usurp that path. In doing so, the Kremlin threatens all free people; if Ukraine can be attacked and deprived of those rights given by nature and nature’s God, so can the rest of Europe and the world.
Indeed, successful acts of aggression by one despot tend to embolden despots everywhere. A Russian victory, either by force or concession, would send an invigorating shock wave from Damascus to Pyongyang, from Tehran to Beijing, and from Caracas to every other center of tyranny. Ukraine is under siege today. Taiwan could be tomorrow.
“Russia cannot and must not win this war,” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted recently. “Accepting the normalization of the illegal use of force would mean calling European security and global security into question. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine must fail.”
Those calling for Ukraine’s surrender or a peace deal favorable to Moscow would do well to learn from the failed appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Despotism is a restless monster that preys and feeds on the bones of the weak. You cannot control a creature whose nature knows only the lust for power at any human cost. The only way to overcome it is by refusing to be defeated. By daring to be free.
Today, the Kremlin is actively working to subvert the principles of freedom and democracy. They want to destroy, subdue, and rule a sovereign people who chose independence from Moscow more than thirty years ago. To allow their success would be to sit as idle spectators as freedom and democracy are put to a cruel death.
The free world is under attack. Ukraine is a central battleground between democracy and autocracy. It is, in many ways, the theater of a clash as old as time itself. Thus, it is our duty as free people, to join in the great cause of human freedom.
Dakoda Pettigrew