By FRED LARSON

By Feb. 23, the Western World, including the United States was recovering rather well from the historic COVID Pandemic. Then on Feb. 24, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. World oil prices jumped and the price of many grains exploded (Ukraine is one of the world’s breadbaskets).

Initially the Western world assumed the Russian military would quickly overrun Ukraine, and plans were made for a Ukrainian government in exile. The people of Ukraine and its democratically elected President Zelensky, had other ideas. Zelensky, in a Winston Churchill-type moment, told the Western World “I need ammunition, not a ride.” To the surprise of all, the people of Ukraine thwarted the invasion and then began repelling the Russians. The NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries, led by the United States, united in support of Ukraine and sent it vast amounts of weapons to defend itself.

Putin’s invasion, like Hitler’s and Stalin’s invasion of Poland in 1939, is a brutal, evil, imperialistic, unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation.

Eight months into this war of aggression by an evil Russian leader against a peaceful, democratic neighbor, the question is this. Is Putin winning in America?

Heading into our 2022 election for the House and Senate, both the far left and the far right are questioning our support of Ukraine. We may be reliving Hitler’s threat to the Western World and the “America Firsters” of the late 1930s through Dec. 7, 1941.

The Ukrainians are fighting against the current “Axis of Evil” — Russia, Iran and China. This is no hyperbole. These three rogue nations are working together to weaken and harm their common enemy, the democratic Western World. All three of them hate Western democracy and values. They hate freedom of the individual, which they see as an existential threat to their regimes. Putin, after all, was a KGB officer for the Soviet Union. In 2005 Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Putin is committed to putting back together as much of the former Soviet Empire as he can get away with.

We must insist that our Democratic and Republican elected officials recognize that we have a moral duty to support the Ukrainian democracy against what our own Robert H. Jackson, as Chief Prosecutor of the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials, would condemn as “aggressive” war.

Putin’s threat to Western democracies, beyond Ukraine, is so real that Finland and Sweden begged to be admitted as members of NATO. Sweden, which remained neutral in WWII, saw that Russia’s threat was so real that it sought the NATO guarantee that an attack by Russia on one NATO member was deemed an attack on all NATO members.

It has been a recurring debate for 100 years as to whether democracies have the stomach for long struggles against dictators or autocrats. If America, the essential member of NATO, wavers in its support of Ukraine, surely other NATO members will get “weak in the knees” and capitulate to Putin.

President Ronald Reagan’s speech to the House of Common on June 8, 1982 is relevant to us 40 years later. Reagan alleged “day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower.” He added “The British people know that, given strong leadership, time, and a little bit of hope, the forces of good ultimately rally and triumph over evil.”

Reagan surely believed that freedom is not free. For the Ukrainians the cost of freedom is probably about 1,000 killed by the Russians every week. Millions of Ukrainians face a winter with no electricity or natural gas to heat their homes. For Americans and other NATO members the cost of defending freedom is limited to some higher food and fuel prices.

Let America, Republicans and Democrats alike, prove to Russia, Iran and China that in defense of Ukrainian democracy, in defense of good versus evil, we are a sturdy oak and not a fragile flower.

Fred Larson is a 1973 graduate of the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a 1976 Yale Law School graduate and a retired Jamestown City Court judge.