Ukrainians are worthy heirs to the American patriots of 1776

We Americans, having just celebrated our Independence Day, continue to hear arguments that we should turn our backs on Ukrainians’ struggle for their own independence. Loud voices on the far right and far left insist that we walk away from Ukraine’s struggle against Russia’s unprovoked aggression.

As Russian leaders have declared their goal is to extinguish an independent Ukraine, and insist on terms that would make the nation’s elimination inevitable, ending U.S. support means ending an independent Ukraine.

This seems a good time to assess the strength of Ukrainians’ claim to independence and compare it with our own in 1776. As strong as our case was, and as much as we and the world have benefited from the founding of an independent nation, Ukrainians’ case for freedom from Russia is even stronger.

We famously objected to British taxation without representation. If Russia again subordinates Ukraine, Ukrainians will face something much worse. Pervasive corruption and repression deny all but a handful of close allies of President Vladimir Putin any representation in the Russian system, nominal elections notwithstanding. Opposition activists are routinely imprisoned or killed. And because Russian kleptocracy systematically redistributes wealth from the rest of the country to elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Ukrainians would have to pay far more than the miserable public services they would receive.

But Russia does not just tax money from its conquered lands. To continue Putin’s never-ending wars of aggression against his neighbors, his regime drafts and coerces non-Russians and those from its hinterlands into the armed forces. Because Putin’s regime regards these people as ethnically inferior, it places little value on their lives and condemns them to suicidal “meat wave” attacks to draw enemy fire.

Already, the occupied areas of eastern Ukraine are largely devoid of men between their late teens and their early sixties. The same fate awaits the rest of Ukraine should it fall under Russian control.

American colonists decried British oppression, citing particularly the Boston Massacre, in which British soldiers killed five members of mob that was pelting them with debris. The British were harsh, repressive rulers in Massachusetts. But their brutality pales next to that of Russia, which slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Ukrainian civilians after occupying Ukrainian cities such as Bucha, Irpin, Izyum and Kherson. Nor does this history of oppression end there. Virtually every Ukrainian family has relatives among the millions starved in the Holodomor, the artificial famine of 1932-33, when the Russian-dominated Soviet Union stripped Ukraine of the food it had grown so that it could be exported in exchange for American machine tools.

Ukrainians are far more united in seeking independence than were the Americans of 1776. Historians estimate that about one-third of Americans supported independence from Britain, another third sought to remain British subjects and the remaining third was ambivalent.

In contrast, every single oblast (province) of Ukraine voted for independence in a referendum following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The margin was, to be sure, narrower in Ukraine’s more Russified regions and wider in those with more connections to the West, but every single one, including Crimea, came out solidly in favor of charting their own independent path. Donetsk and Luhansk — the main fronts in today’s fighting — both supported independence from Russia by margins of five-to-one.

Russia’s recent sham annexation plebiscites, conducted at gunpoint, cannot erase that result. A referendum in 1776 in America likely would have produced much more ambiguous outcome.

Part of 18th-century Americans’ frustration stemmed from Britain’s insistence on a failed economic system, steering all commerce through London and denying Americans lucrative trading opportunities with other countries. But British mercantilism was supremely efficient compared to Russia’s hopelessly corrupt centralized economy. Despite having vast oil, gas and mineral resources Russia’s GDP is smaller than that of Italy. Being placed under this system would crush Ukraine’s vibrant entrepreneurial culture, forcing many businesses to close and compelling others to pay off Putin’s cronies to stay open.

Russia and its apologists claim that Ukraine’s self-defense against its invasion is somehow a “proxy war” conducted by NATO. This is absurd — an attack from Russia initiated the war, and a withdrawal from Russia to borders it has repeatedly recognized would end it. Britain would have had a much better claim that the American Revolution was a proxy war of the French, who contributed combat soldiers to the American cause, and whose navy fought off British ships trying to resupply the Yorktown garrison. Yet we properly still claim the revolution as ours, because it was fought for our national self-determination.

Some argue that lingering corruption in Ukraine should disqualify it from Western support. Ukraine has made great strides, but we should not be surprised that problems remain a mere 10 years after the fall of its last Russian puppet-government. And the moral stain of corruption, while real, pales next to chattel slavery, which was central to the economy of revolutionary-era America.

When given the chance, Ukrainians have achieved remarkable social progress. They had a female prime minister before the U.S. had a female speaker of the House — much less a female president. It currently has a president of Jewish ancestry and a Muslim defense minister.

The newly independent U.S. had much to teach the rest of the world and has inspired freedom-loving people for 248 years. Ukrainians’ tenacious struggle for independence and democracy is doing the same today. They deserve our full support.

David A. Super is a professor of law at Georgetown Law. He also served for several years as the general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.