A woman walks between graves of Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat since Russia’s February, 2022 full scale invasion of the country, at a military cemetery in the western city of Lviv, on Jan. 30.FINBARR O'REILLY/The New York Times News Service
Major Dave Smith (retired) served 15 years in the Canadian Armed Forces as an infantry officer. He now fights with the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches its third year, many smart and well-meaning people are doing their best to prevent the citizens of democratic countries from losing interest in the war. Think tanks such as the Institute for the Study of War and high-profile political leaders such as Germany’s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius have recently published important statements on what will happen if Ukraine loses.
From what I have seen, all these warnings make the same basic argument: Vladimir Putin must be stopped in Ukraine so he does not continue his conquest elsewhere. If he succeeds in Ukraine, so the argument goes, he will attack another country, likely even a NATO country. The specifically American twist given to this argument is articulated as follows: “We must enable the Ukrainians to defeat the Russian military today so that we are not forced to deploy the U.S. military to defeat them in the future.”
While I am sympathetic to these positions, I fear those who argue for them are missing the significance of what is going on in Ukraine. They think of Ukraine as an important piece of geography, strategic depth that partitions Russia from the West. To use some old-fashioned military jargon, they are focused on the “physical plane of warfare.”
Far more important is what we used to call “the moral plane of warfare.”
War is not a contest over land. It is a contest over the beliefs that move the souls of those who live on the land. In Ukraine, that contest is rooted in the oldest and simplest moral belief that ever turned a citizen into a soldier, namely, freedom from tyranny.
Liberty is at war with tyranny in Ukraine. Tyranny is attacking liberty because tyrants know they can never co-exist with free people. Truly free people believe liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm others, and the exercise of that right is founded upon a respect for the liberty of all people. When a dispute arises over the boundary between our liberties, that dispute is settled through the fairness and impartiality of law.
Tyrants think the opposite. They believe in using fear and violence to impose their will upon others. Tyrants define themselves by their rejection of liberty. They fundamentally disrespect and devalue their fellow human beings. A tyrant believes he can only be free if all others are his slaves. In a tyranny, law is an arbitrary farce that exists only to remind the slaves they are subject to the cruel and absolute will of the tyrant.
Among the world’s tyrants, Mr. Putin is the pacesetter. All who think like him are watching how the free world responds to his war of aggression in Ukraine. They want to see if he will pull it off. If we force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate with him, if we allow Russian aggression to become codified into international law, the would-be tyrants of the world will know they can take what they want through violence because eventually free people will submit.
The outcome of that negotiation that we should fear most is not a geographically smaller Ukraine; we must fear the inevitable surge of emboldened tyrants who will seek to mimic Mr. Putin’s success. Liberty destroys itself the moment it recognizes tyranny as an equal. That is what is truly at stake in Ukraine.
I fear that what I have said here will not register with my fellow Canadians. Canadians do not understand that they are also at war. They are dangerously ignorant because our political and military leaders consistently fail to explain the war between liberty and tyranny in terms the average citizen can understand. The alleged interference in our elections by the Chinese Communist Party and the political assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen gunned down on Canadian soil outside his family’s place of worship – these are the probing attacks of tyranny. And they will get worse.
Understand the war you’re in. The tyrants are coming for you. If we do not stand up to them, our fate is sealed.