If we fail in our duty to help Ukraine, it is not just Britain’s honor that is at stake, EDWARD LUCAS

Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech at Westminster Hall on Wednesday was a resounding endorsement of everything this country values: freedom, justice and individual dignity, delivered with lofty rhetoric and well-chosen humour.

The Ukrainian President, like other statesmen, Charles de Gaulle, Nelson Mandela, who were awarded this great national honor, reminded us how lucky we are to live in security, freedom and prosperity. Ukrainians die for what we take for granted.

That alone should warrant a favorable response to the Ukrainian leader’s impassioned plea for help as his country braces for a new Russian attack.

But our national security, as well as our principles, are at stake.

The fight may be 3,000 miles away, but a victory for Vladimir Putin would be a catastrophe for us in Britain. He would vindicate the Kremlin dictator’s beliefs that Russia has the right to interfere in neighboring countries and that outsiders are too weak-willed to stop it.

Ukrainians die for what we take for granted. Pictured: Ukrainian army’s 43rd Heavy Artillery Brigade near Bahmut in the Donetsk region

I am writing this from the Estonian capital, Tallinn. The atrocities perpetrated by Russian soldiers in the occupied parts of Ukraine – torture, rape, kidnapping and murder – happened here in living memory under the Soviet occupation. Fear hangs in the air.

Estonia, like its neighbors Latvia and Lithuania, is a member of NATO, which means that we are bound by treaty to defend it. Already a thousand British soldiers are based here. But if Putin’s gamble in the Ukraine succeeds, he will no doubt be tempted to test NATO’s resolve in these Baltic states, facing us with a choice between defeat and all-out war.

Far better, then, to defeat the Russian imperialist dragon while we still have Ukraine, a large, formidably determined and resilient country of 40 million people, on our side. Otherwise, in a few years we will face a struggle with an emboldened Russia on the thin, flat strip of land on the eastern side of the Baltic Sea. That will be much more difficult to defend.

My old friend Peter Hitchens and I covered the collapse of communism together. We share our love for cycling, railways and the ancient liturgy of our Anglican faith. Peter aptly describes Putin as a “sinister tyrant.”

But in Ukraine, Peter is wrong.

He thinks we have provoked Russia. Not so. The roots of the current conflict go back to the early 1990s. Even under the supposedly friendly Boris Yeltsin, the Kremlin declared its right to intervene abroad on behalf of ‘Russian speakers’. This is just as absurd and sinister as a British or American government threatening other countries on behalf of ‘English speakers’.

The fight may be 3,000 miles away, but a victory for Vladimir Putin would be a catastrophe for us in Britain.

Russia has launched poisonous propaganda attacks on its former colonies, interfered in their politics, cut off their gas supplies and used military force to back separatists in Moldova and Georgia.

Few in Britain noticed. But in eastern Europe, the cold wind from the east brought chills.

These countries knocked on the door of NATO. Thank God we let most of them in. Unfortunately Ukraine, along with Georgia, was relegated to the waiting room.

Contrary to Putin’s claims of treason and encirclement, NATO negotiated enlargement with Moscow, striving to make it acceptable. It explicitly ruled out any threat from Russia, held no exercises in its new eastern members, and placed no military infrastructure there. This was ‘Nato-lite’. It did not represent any military danger to Russia.

It was Russia that broke that deal: attacking Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014. Recall also the 2006 London assassination, with radioactive poison, of defector Alexander Litvinenko.

Putin made anti-Westernism the center of his ideology, fueling Russian paranoia about ‘foreign agents’ and creating scare stories about resurgent Nazi sentiment.

Time and time again, the West ignored this. We patronized and belittled those in Eastern Europe who warned us of the coming storm. Only when Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine did we finally wake up. And even then our response has been far too little, as well as woefully late.

If we had sent the aid to Ukraine a year ago that we are sending now, the war would never have happened. Every month we decide to do a little more, first artillery, then tanks, but only once again hundreds, probably thousands, of Ukrainians are killed and maimed. This is no time for pats on the back.

The call for fighter jets is mainly symbolic. The RAF’s advanced planes are of no use for Ukraine: it takes years to train pilots to fly them. But in principle, the more weapons we send, and the sooner we do it, the better. Other countries have planes that Ukrainians can fly now or with minimal training. But dozens of their most skilled pilots have perished while we faltered.

Far better, then, to defeat the Russian imperialist dragon while we still have Ukraine, a large, formidably determined and resilient country of 40 million people, on our side. In the photo: Ukrainian rescuers at the site of a damaged residential building after a missile attack in Kharkiv

Peter fears an escalation. I don’t. Russia’s advantage over us is willpower and propaganda. These count in the war of nerves, but not in a real military confrontation. Putin’s nuclear weapons would be useless in Ukraine. They would trigger a devastating military response from us and a diplomatic ice age, mainly from Putin’s only real friend, China.

Britain and its allies are 20 times stronger than Russia. We should act like this. We can win this if we want.

The alternative is isolation. Peter wants us to leave NATO, which he sees as useless and provocative, and focus solely on defending our own island shores.

I disagree. NATO’s expansion helped stabilize and reform Eastern Europe. Outside of NATO, our decades of skimping on defense would be cruelly and dangerously exposed.

In a world without US-led alliances, Russia and China would be in turmoil, Europe in chaos. We would have to double or triple our defense spending to hope to stay safe. Whenever we have withdrawn from European security in past centuries, the result has been disastrous.

Peter also translates Ukraine as a Nazi-infested swamp of corruption. I have visited this wonderful country regularly and have seen how it has struggled to overcome the legacy of Soviet rule. Yes, it has right-wing extremists. There are those who maintain that the Soviet scourge was even worse than that of the Nazis. But none of this affects the country’s right to choose its future, and our duty to protect and help it.

“I stand before you on behalf of the brave,” Zelensky told our legislators. Will we be brave too? Or will we let Ukraine and everything it stands for be crushed before our eyes?

I know where I stand.

Edward Lucas is the author of The New Cold War.