(4/4)

If Americans let Ukrainians down, it will be a blow, perhaps a fatal one, to the "spirit of freedom," as a Ukrainian veteran put it in a speech I heard at the Munich Security Council.  We need that spirit, in part to oppose those who lack it.  The people who block aid for Ukraine today wish our own democracy ill.

In the last few days and weeks we have witnessed, again and again, the overlap between Russian influence in American politics, opposition to aid to Ukraine, and hostility toward the American constitutional system.  Putin knows that his only route to Kyiv passes through Washington, D.C., and he has acted accordingly.

The people working to assure the destruction of democracy in Ukraine also oppose democracy in America. We have just experienced a bogus impeachment proceeding against President Biden, where the chief accusation (long ago discredited by Ukrainian and other journalists, incidentally) arose from a Russian agent. Mike Johnson is in a submission chain that passes through Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Trump presents himself as an admirer of Putin and had been his client, in one form or another, for a decade. He has succeeded in conditioning the media by teaching his followers to shout "Russia hoax" whenever the subject comes up: but, all the same, Russia has backed him in every campaign and is backing him in this one. Johnson's 2018 congressional campaign, for that matter, took laundered funds from a Russian oligarch, and Johnson was one of the congressmen most deeply implicated in Trump's attempted coup in 2021.

Ukraine should and can win this war.  To do so, it needs arms and funds.  The amount needed of both is tiny on an American scale, not anything we would even notice.  It is the choices of certain Americans that have
brought the Ukrainians to this cruel pass, and brought the world to the edge of multiple catastrophe.  Should we fail to assist Ukraine, we will be inviting the worst of catastrophes.  We will put the security of the world at risk, and betray what is best about ourselves.  Americans can enable Ukrainian victory.  If we fail to do so, we will face an apocalypse Americans have chosen.  And, in particular, an apocalypse Mike Johnson has chosen.