Odessa was the pearl of the Black Sea. It still is. Life goes on, but the signs of war are also present. The art museums are open but boarded up against the threat of missile and drone strikes. Every apartment building, school, and hotel has bomb shelters. Restaurants inform their patrons where to go if the air raid siren goes off. Ukrainians know well that whatever the Russian propaganda may be, Russia directs its attacks against civil infrastructure and symbols of culture. Washington pundits may debate the war in sterile, political science jargon, and many within the Trump administration might embrace moral equivalence if outright apologetics for Russian aggression, but Ukrainians see that they face an army of annihilation. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own writings and speeches make this clear.
This reality makes much of the Washington debate seem unhinged, if not malicious. So too does the hypocrisy. Opponents of supporting Ukraine suggest both Moscow and Kyiv are insincere. Election postponement demonstrates Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky’s dictatorial tendency, the argument goes. Republicans argue that Zelensky’s postponement of elections suggests he is an aspiring autocrat rather than a sincere democrat. By that standard, Winston Churchill, who rallied the British in their darkest hour, would be a Putin-esque dictator, too; a nonsensical argument.
True, the United States held elections during the Civil War, but this example is irrelevant for two reasons. First, the end of the war was less than five months away, and, second, the nature of both warfare and political campaigning was different. Advances occurred at the speed of an army’s march, that is, at a glacial pace compared to the mechanized units and aircraft that ferry today’s troops. Nor did Lincoln need to worry about drone swarms and hypersonic missiles. As important, Lincoln did not need to worry about foreign powers supporting the Confederacy’s financing of election interference, the way the Kremlin surely would.
Others among the MAGA crowd argue that Ukraine is a morass of corruption. This is a calumny. Ukraine did suffer corruption, but the 2014 Maidan Revolution was in part a rejection of the political leadership’s tolerance of corruption. Such an argument also exposes inconsistency. Transparency International, which measures perceptions of corruption globally, ranks both Russia and Turkey as more corrupt than Ukraine. President Donald Trump’s business conflicts of interest and the epidemic of congressional insider trading further the hypocrisy of this argument. If the United States cannot clean house in peacetime, how does it judge Ukraine in wartime?
The decision to demand concessions in the face of aggression is not only Chamberlain-esque, but it also runs counter to nearly a century of American foreign policy. Republicans objected to the “no war for oil” calumny. Certainly, the United States involved itself militarily in some countries such as Kuwait and Iraq that had oil, but the commonality explaining 80 years of U.S. military engagement is an absolute rejection of wars of conquest, be it reversing German and Japanese aggression in World War II, Communist aggression against South Korea and South Vietnam, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and Serbia’s war on Bosnia. More controversially, the United States involves itself to prevent human rights abuses or counter human suffering, as it did in Somalia, Syria, and Libya.
The current war checks both boxes; the only difference is that the United States need not be directly involved, as Ukraine can do its own fighting if given the means to do so.
Ukraine has cast its lot with the West: Putin, a former KGB functionary, has made clear by word and action his desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union. If the United States is to abandon Ukraine in its darkest hour, it should be honest about it rather than promote dishonest arguments. It is cowardice, not principle, and hypocrisy, not morality. To continue a pivot toward Putin’s Russia betrays Ukrainians and Russians suffering under Putin’s dictatorship and, more importantly, runs counter to the cause of freedom and to long-term U.S. interests. It is time to recognize the hypocrisy for what it is.
