I agree, sadly. This war has no justification. Not ‘NATO expansion.’ Not ‘denazification.’ Not Ukrainian ‘liberation.’ It is all about Putin’s Potemkin dream of a reconstituted USSR, and that’s no justification at all. Putin pushed the world into this war. How do you appease a dictator? You cannot. Was that not the lesson to be learned in WWII? Countless will die needless deaths; war is and always be hell. There is no Kellogg-Briand Pact of magical thinking. Sadly, the only choice is live free or die.

Putin pushed the world into this war and the world had no choice but to respond in kind: Military war and economic war with all the power the western world could muster. Putin must be stopped because Xi is watching, Kim is waiting, and the world's authoritarians are circling like vultures to pick apart the dead corpse of America and the democratic West. To the victors go the spoils.

Live free or die. Dead bodies or dead souls. It is a proxy war: A fight for the existential survival of liberty. There is no middle ground in this war. If Putin triumphs, what is happening inside Russia, China, and North Korea will be the new world order.