Sometimes I’m tempted to think that a fraction of the left gets its views on Ukraine from Vladimir Putin’s cyber-disinformation network. Take John Berkowitz’ guest column on June 15.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 with no provocation: Ukraine’s far smaller army posed no threat and no threats were made. Putin had two pretexts: 1. Ukraine did not exist as a country, it had been part of Russia and was now a mere outpost for American imperialism; 2. Its government was now neo-Nazi and his “special military operation” was going to “denazify” it. There were letters and columns in the Gazette essentially echoing Putin’s lies. 1. Without evidence, they wrote that the uprising in Maidan Square, which forced out a repressive Russian puppet and later democratically elected a new president, was really a CIA coup. I imagine they were thinking of actual CIA coups in Latin America, but people with real knowledge refuted this fantasy: Timothy Snyder, who taught Ukrainian history at Yale; and Michael Klare in these pages, among others. 2. They then claimed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, might not be a Nazi, but was an illegitimate ruler. Finally, and more seriously, they evoked the nightmare of nuclear war, since Putin has the atomic bomb and might use it, they warned, if Ukraine did not capitulate.
Timothy Snyder analyzed the threat of nuclear war. (He is an internationally respected expert on Ukraine, the history of central Europe and the nature of freedom and tyranny). We should actually be grateful to Ukraine, he wrote, for not yielding to Putin. Capitulating is wrong morally: a nation has a right to resist invasion. And politically: if a nuclear state can force others to do its bidding, non-nuclear states will always surrender, and nuclear states will run the world. China will feel free to invade Taiwan, North Korea to invade South Korea. Under normal presidents, the U.S. would not just stand by. Now there’s a nightmare!
Ukrainians are not so different from us. Would you choose life under Putin, who murders critics, impoverishes the country while enriching his oligarchs, or life in western-style democracy? The Ukrainians massively chose the West in 2013-14, threw out Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt Russian puppet who had refused to move closer to Europe, and in 2019 elected Zelensky. Google “Euromaidan” for details. He won the election with 73.23 percent of the vote, the biggest landslide in the history of Ukraine.
But Mr. Berkowitz claims he’s very unpopular now because Ukrainians are sick of the war. I couldn’t find the Gallup poll he cites: a headline says his popularity is down but doesn’t say by how much. The June 22 Kyiv Independent says “Zelensky’s trust rating drops 11 points to 65%, poll shows.” And many polling firms from the end of March on: “His current approval rating is down from [over] 80% in the first two years of the war; despite the decline, twice as many Ukrainians overall continue to approve rather than disapprove of Zelenskyy.” Here’s Le Monde, the paper of reference in France, June 16, 2025: “The Ukrainian president enjoys a 67% approval rating in his country, up 10 points since his tense meeting with Donald Trump and JD Vance.”
War is always horrible. World War II killed 60 million people. Should England and France have sat tight when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939? They knew he wouldn’t stop at Poland. In fact, had they refused to give Hitler an industrialized piece of Czechoslovakia the year before to preserve “peace” and beefed up their military instead, the war might have been avoided. Putin invaded and annexed Ukrainian Crimea in 2014. The West did not react. Now, he says, “the whole of Ukraine is ours.” (Boston Globe, June 21). But the guest column says no weapons to Ukraine! Force them to negotiate and promise not to join NATO! Why would he stop with a mere part of Ukraine in a “peace” deal like that? A recent issue of Foreign Policy says Putin won’t stop unless he thinks he has no chance to win.
The authorities cited at the end of the guest column are as unreliable as the polls cited. For example, “renowned Russia expert” Richard Sakwa is indeed “renowned”— in Putin’s Russia. He claims Russia’s war against little Georgia (pop. 3,700 million) was “defensive” and Russia, despite Putin’s well-documented desire to restore “Greater Russia,” is “not an expansionist country.” If he said the opposite there, he would fall off a roof. Poland and the Baltic States were also part of Russia once, as they remember — and look to NATO for defense.
We should not abandon a democracy to the vicious aggression of its larger, more powerful neighbor.
David Ball is a professor emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Smith College. He lives in Northampton.