All Ukrainians must be Paul Reveres

Not all Ukrainians everywhere have the righteous opportunity to enlist in any Ukrainian military detachment and fight in Ukraine’s war of independence against Russia. But all Ukrainians everywhere have the opportunity and responsibility to become Paul Reveres.

Whether at midnight or midday, we must sound the clarion that the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.

For eight months since Viktor Yanukoyvch was ousted from the presidency of Ukraine, Russia has been fulfilling its manifest destiny by first invading and annexing Crimea, and then sending its mercenary terrorists to main and kill Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in eastern Ukraine. Putin, like Hitler, warned he would do so in the summer of 2013. Today, just as then, no one listened or believed the threat.

At the same time global leaders and institutions, like stunned deer caught staring into headlights in a dark forest, have treaded gingerly around Moscow’s flagrant belligerence against Ukraine not even daring to elevate the stakes by using words such as war and invasion.

Ukrainians around the world must use all forms of communication to announce that what is happening in eastern Ukraine today is Russia’s inevitable war of aggression against Ukraine. Indeed, over time it will expand to the other former captive nations unless Putin is stopped.

Leaders of the free world must realize that Russia’s war against Ukraine is the beginning of the war for the future of civilization. Talk, pleas, threats and sanctions haven’t stopped the war. Our way of life is at stake and success rests in the willingness of the US, Canada, UK, NATO, Australia and others to resolutely stop Putin’s advancing armies.

Ukrainians and the other x-captive nations must bring this message to their congresses and parliaments and seats of government. The world rallied around the call to stop Hitler in 1939, and now it must rally around the call to stop Putin in 2014 before it is too late.