This is about him, it is about us, and it is about Ukraine.
The Ukraine crisis is about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been in power for 22 years and is suffering from rationality slippage. He is doubling down on his premeditated, unprovoked, illegal, and immoral war because he has grown more rigid and isolated.
It's more about the West and whether we can reverse the decline of democratic gains around the world since 2006 Putin is the result of our forgetting what dictators do when they are appeased. The immediate victim is Ukraine.
We did not respond to Russia's cyberattacks on us in 2007, Georgian invasion in 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014).
A flurry of weekend announcements signals a shift in Europe and a move within the Biden administration to a more assertive posture, suggesting a growing realization that Putin's aggressions are as much a danger to Europe as it is to Ukraine. On Saturday, the European Union, the U.S, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Japan and Canada announced major economic sanctions against Russia.
The moves included removing select Russian banks from the SWIFT system, which undermines their ability to act globally, as well as measures that will prevent the Russian Central Bank from using its reserves in ways that could undermine the impact of sanctions. The German Chancellor's announcement of a ground-breaking decision to arm Ukraine with anti-aircraft systems and missiles followed by his Sunday decision to increase defense spending to more than 2% of GDP was accompanied by that.
The Russian invasion marks a turning point.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an independent country with 44 million people. Since then, the primary threat to Moscow has been the example of independence, freedom, and prosperity that Ukraine has to offer, one that Putin is trying to snuff out with lies.
Zelenskyy refused to leave the country's capital of Kyiv despite the danger to his life. Zelenskyy said he didn't need a ride after U.S. officials offered to evacuate him.
Putin was surprised by the stubbornness of the Ukrainians and Western democracies have more time to act. Russian troops and undercover units were defeated by the Ukrainian military and thousands of volunteers in the city of Kyiv on Saturday.
There is no doubt that Putin will double down in the days to come. He has only begun to understand what harm his troops can cause. The ill-advised war threatens Putin's own survival. Russia's nuclear deterrent forces were put on high alert by him.
If fierce Ukrainian resistance leads to a long and bloody war, Yaroslav Trofimov from Kyiv wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
If Putin is not stopped, his armies will move closer to NATO members who are now members of the European Union. The actions of this weekend were driven by a gathering consensus that Putin would not stop at Ukraine.
The Ukrainians are brave enough to remind us of the liberties we take for granted. During the last years of the Cold War, the Polish people and the pope played a role in my reporting as a reporter in Eastern and Central Europe.
The most inspiring moment of the weekend for me was a private dinner with Ukrainian parliamentarians in their thirties or younger.
They spoke with the passion of individuals who understood they were on the front lines of freedom, appealing to their European and American colleagues to defend the Ukrainian democracy they had inspired.
One former parliamentarian spoke of the commitments made to Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The U.S., Great Britain, and Russia offered security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for its agreement to return all of its nuclear weapons to Russia.
She said that it was time for the U.S. and its partners to deliver on their commitments.
President Zelenskyy's delegation would have a better chance to succeed in talks with a Russian delegation if they were confident that the West had regained control of Ukraine.
Frederick Kempe is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council.
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