Ukraine's Future Hinges on Holding the Moral High Ground Now

If you lean toward supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, or if you’re a pacifist convinced of the inherent criminality of armed conflict, you’ll find evidence that, for all of its adroit messaging, Ukraine’s conduct during the war is hardly impeccable.

There’s the recent United Nations report that appears to confirm Vladimir Putin’s frequent accusation that the Ukrainian military uses civilians as “living shields” — a practice banned by the Geneva Conventions — by deploying in residential areas and buildings from which people have not been evacuated. Both the UN and some reputable human rights organizations also have questioned Ukraine’s treatment of Russian prisoners of war.

There’s the alarming story of Ukraine’s former human rights commissioner, Lyudmyla Denysova, who told horror tales of child rape by Russian soldiers that could not be independently confirmed after getting her daughter a contract with the international aid organization UNICEF to run a telephone helpline. The daughter apparently provided the evidence-free material to Denysova, strengthening the Russian narrative that Ukraine is faking evidence of Russian atrocities.

There’s former Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk’s stubborn defense of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whom Poles and Israelis consider a genocidaire but whom many Ukrainians, especially in the country’s west, revere for his single-minded pursuit of his people’s independent statehood. Melnyk’s scandalous apologia for the nationalist assassinated in Germany by the KGB has added fuel to Putin’s claim that Ukraine needs “denazification.”

Finally, examples abound of Ukrainians profiting from the national emergency. In April, the Ukrainian parliament lifted customs duties to speed the import of vehicles for the military and emergency services. In the next two months, almost 100,000 vehicles were imported, including a Ferrari, a McLaren and other expensive cars; on July 1, the customs duty was reimposed. Given how corruption-rotted Ukraine’s economy has been throughout the post-Soviet years, stories of wartime graft, profiteering and abuse of Western assistance will doubtless increase once peace is restored.

You could dismiss these unsavory examples simply by recalling the most fundamental fact of the war: Ukraine is the side that has been attacked and invaded by its much bigger neighbor. It is the wronged party and the underdog. All independent reports overwhelmingly blame Russia for wreaking outrage on civilians, from targeting residential areas to documented cases of rape and summary execution. Russian propaganda lies on a grand scale. Putin’s increasingly fascist, almost-totalitarian regime has no right to talk of denazifying anyone.