Defining the Limits on Aiding Ukraine

From: Letters to The New York Times, May 27, 2022
  
image from entry: Credit...Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 

To the Editor: 

Re “The War in Ukraine Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready” (editorial, Sunday Review, May 22): 

Your editorial is rife with contradictions. It sensibly favors continued military support to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, and it acknowledges that it’s the Ukrainians who must decide what an end to the war might look like. Yet it recommends limiting U.S. assistance to avoid a wider war with Russia. 

Giving with one hand and taking away with the other is a losing formula for dealing with a revanchist Russia that seeks nothing less than to erase Ukraine from the map.

Ukraine’s military successes have exceeded everyone’s expectations. Now is not the time for ambivalence or hesitation in providing Kyiv what it needs to ensure that Moscow suffers a strategic defeat. That is the best way to achieve a fair settlement that restores Ukrainian sovereignty, rather than a tenuous one that Russia will repeatedly violate. 

Alexander Vershbow 
Philadelphia 
The writer is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, former NATO deputy secretary general and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. 

[jb: see Wikipedia, which notes:] "He [Vershbow] learned to play the drums at a young age and kept up his passion abroad including occasionally playing in bands with other Ambassadors while on foreign  assignments." jb: The USA Ambassdor doing his musical thing image from:]


To the Editor: 

Thank you for starting the conversation about how to pull the U.S. back from Armageddon in Ukraine.

It is time for the administration and Congress to reassess their open-ended commitment of money and weapons to this conflict. With one million deaths from Covid-19, raging inflation, and spiraling political and social crises at home, U.S. taxpayers will quickly tire of this war, if they haven’t already. 

Steve Roddy 
San Francisco

To the Editor:

As an American voter, I find your suggestion that “inflation is a much bigger issue for American voters than Ukraine” deeply insulting both to me and to my fellow Americans. You are saying, in effect, that we care more about prices than about women and children being raped and killed in Ukraine, let alone the cause of freedom in the fight against tyranny and oppression. 

Yes, our continuing military support of Ukraine can lead to terrible suffering, but it can also help change the course of human history for the better. 

Lacking a crystal ball, we can be guided either by our moral values or by our fears, and I don’t believe that our fears will do us any good. 

Eugene Levine 
Fremont, Calif.

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