When Putin announced his war against Ukraine in an angry, rambling address to Russia and the world in February 2022, he used very specific language to justify it, claiming that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified” and freed from “nationalists.” This language has particular resonance with large segments of Russia, for Putin has spent much of the last 20 years creating a cult of World War II around himself.

In 1945, the Soviet Union emerged from World War II on the winning side. Since then it has claimed the leading role in ending the Nazi regime. However, what is rarely admitted inside Russia, is that they did not start out on that side. In 1939, the USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. During that time, among other atrocities, they committed the Katyn Forest Massacre, where they executed over 22000 Polish citizens simply because they were Polish. The USSR willingly sided with a fellow homicidal and genocidal regime just seven years after Stalin himself had tried to eliminate Ukrainians through the Holodomor famine (1932–1933), justifying it “because they were nationalists.” They were deemed “nationalists” because they wanted an independent Ukraine, such as had existed before the creation of the Soviet Union. Neither the Soviet Union nor Russia – its successor state and center of power in the Russian Empire – has ever been required to face up to its colonial past and its genocidal past, and it has tried to stop internal examinations of its homicidal past. Germany was forced to undergo a national reckoning into its crimes through the Nuremberg Trials and after. The world has never forced the Soviet Union, or Russia, to do the same, and they did not face a Nuremberg-like tribunal for their actions in World War II. Thus, they continue to feel entitled to use words such as Putin uses.

In speaking about Ukrainians, Putin often professes a Russian chauvinistic colonial attitude, claiming that they are a lesser people, along the lines of “Russian white trash” or Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” On 3 March 2022, when Putin was giving a litany of “I am X,” where X is various Russian Federation ethnicities, he did not say he was Ukrainian. However, Putin is somewhat contradictory in his speech: he cannot make up his mind if Ukrainians are the same as Russians, but inferior, different from Russians and inferior, or the same, but they are ruled by Nazis and nationalists and must be liberated from them. There are heavy doses of all three in his statements. What is clear is that, at a minimum in Putin’s mind, the “bad” Ukrainians have to be eliminated to make way for “good” Russified Ukrainians. This is exactly what Stalin was thinking at the time of the Holodomor.

Putin’s language in describing his end game is especially haunting: the phraseology he uses, namely “the resolution of the Ukrainian question / решениe украинского вопроса,” is identical to the Russian translation of Hitler’s “the resolution of the Jewish question / решениe еврейского вопроса.” Putin is openly admitting that he is prepared to commit genocide against Ukrainians and to destroy the Ukrainian state, just as Stalin tried to do. Putin has told us who he is, and Putin has told us what he intends to do.

Russian history also tells us what he will do. Every Russian imperial project, including the Soviet one, started with Ukraine. None of them stopped with Ukraine. If not stopped here, now, and permanently, Putin’s war of conquest will continue to Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and on from there. Indeed, in 2014, Putin made the same type of “fake state” remarks about Kazakhstan that he has used against Ukraine.

These Russian actions require a strong and robust response, but, on the US side, such a response has been greatly hindered by two critical mistakes made knowingly and willingly by President Joe Biden. First, in the days leading up to Russia’s war on Ukraine, he ordered the US embassy in Kyiv abandoned and its personnel relocated first to Lviv and then outside of Ukraine. Maintaining a presence in Kyiv, reinforced by US Marine Corps guards and which could have been supplemented by US special forces troops, would have projected strength. Biden’s cut-and-run strategy, as previously seen in 2021 in Afghanistan, demonstrated weakness. Meanwhile, the French still maintain their embassy in Kyiv, complete with extra special forces troops to guard it. The more critical mistake, however, is in the words that Biden continues to utter – his promise that American forces will not take part in military action against Russia in Ukraine. A strong leader – and Biden, it should be noted, is a life-long late-to-arrive follower, never a leader – would have stated strongly and clearly that “all options remain on the table until Russia completely withdraws from Ukraine.” By refusing to do that, Biden has, essentially, given Putin a green light to continue his barbarism in Ukraine and beyond. This is a far cry from how Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, and even Bill Clinton would have responded in similar situations.

On a wider scale, a strong and robust response has been hindered by false concerns of Western “escalation” and irrational fears of nuclear conflict.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, escalated by launching a full-scale war in February 2022, escalated further by bombing civilian targets, such as hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings, escalated yet more by attacking the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and promises further escalation by using chemical weapons and shooting down civilian airliners in false-flag operations. It is already estimated that Russia has murdered more civilians than it has killed members of the Ukrainian military. It has been rumored that the Russians have bombed Belarus in an attempt to draw them into the war, thus potentially escalating on that front, and they have escalated again by bombing a training base near the Polish border, a location where volunteers have been assembling to help Ukraine. Bringing in mercenaries from Syria and using Wagner group forces also represent escalation. In the early days of the war, a very brave Ukrainian woman addressed Russian occupiers, correctly asserting, while offering them sunflower seeds: “How can it be further escalated? You fucking came here uninvited.”

While there will be the inevitable claim that direct US/NATO involvement would give Putin a propaganda victory at home, recall that Putin has always and continues to blame the West for everything bad that happens in and to Russia. His is a rule centered on grievance and victimhood – nothing will ever change that. Thus, US/NATO involvement will change nothing on the Russian home propaganda front.

While it is rational to have concerns about nuclear war, it is irrational to have such overriding fears that it paralyses into complete inaction. Putin is counting on this. That is why he constantly makes nuclear threats whenever the US/NATO provide any aid to Ukraine or discuss doing anything for Ukraine. He is clearly terrified of the US/NATO engaging Russia directly, for he knows that he will lose even more quickly than he is losing now.

The United States has confronted the Soviet Union many times over the last 70 years. US pilots shot down Soviet-manned aircraft during the Korean and Vietnam eras. The United States faced off against a nuclear-armed Soviet Union in staging the Berlin Airlift and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy had earlier failed to stand up to the Soviet Union during the construction of the Berlin Wall, fearing it could lead to direct military confrontation. However, documents from the Khrushchev era clearly state that Khrushchev had ordered that construction be immediately stopped if the US protested or tried to take down the wall. Failing to stand up to Soviet aggression in Berlin condemned its inhabitants to decades locked behind the Wall. In more recent times, Turkey, a member of NATO, shot down a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft that had strayed over its airspace from Syria in November 2015, and in 2018, the United States eliminated a 200-man Russian mercenary force in Syria. In none of these incidents, spanning 70 years, did the Soviet Union or Russia respond with a nuclear exchange, or, in fact, respond at all. If history has been a correct guide to Russian imperial actions, it can also be a guide to Russian nuclear actions. They will not use them.

It is important to note that, if the US/NATO do not stand up to Russia because of fears of a nuclear response, they are not only handing Putin whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, they are handing anything any illiberal nuclear regime wants whenever they want it. This will guarantee that more and more nations will try to obtain nuclear weapons, and it will make the world an even more dangerous place. Appeasement of Russia for the last 14 years, a time covering administrations of both political parties, but particularly bad during the Obama/Biden administration, has brought the world to this moment. Further appeasement will ensure that what follows is even worse. There is a price to be paid for inaction, and there is a price to be paid for the US withdrawing from the world. Neither is a price we should want to pay.

There is, however, yet one more compelling reason why a stronger and more robust response is required to Russia’s brutality in Ukraine.

After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, the world swore “never again.” Then it happened again in Cambodia in the 1970s and again in Rwanda in 1994. To his credit, Bill Clinton said that one of his greatest regrets was in not intervening to stop it. In 1999, when the Russian-backed Orthodox Serbs were committing genocide against the Muslim Kosovar Albanians, who were not a member of NATO, NATO intervened to stop it. “Never again,” apparently, meant “never again” in Europe. In 2008, after Putin invaded Georgia, George W. Bush sent transport planes, full of humanitarian supplies, to Tbilisi. The planes did not leave, the message being that Putin would have to go through them to finish his conquest of Georgia. Georgia was not a member of NATO. Putin retreated.

Putin has openly stated that he is prepared to commit genocide against Ukraine and the Ukrainian state. Intervention is therefore a moral question, and we must be strong and brave, as the Ukrainians are being strong and brave.

Close the skies.

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Jonathan Z. Ludwig is a Teaching Associate Professor of Russian at Oklahoma State University.