"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." Eleanor Roosevelt

In my recent articles, I focused on Russia in an attempt to provide an alternative perspective on the realities of a country ruled by an incompetent autocrat for the past 23 years and the reasons why I believe the current regime is doomed. I would like to shift my attention to Ukraine for this article to share my perspective on why its fight against Putin is worthy of continued support. I recognise that my views on the speed of the regime’s collapse are optimistic, but my certainty of its inevitability remains unshaken. It is based on my personal experience of working in Moscow, dealing with some of the largest companies, and traveling extensively to every corner of the country. I have a deep appreciation for the nihilistic view of life and the dim view of the future held by a vast segment of the Russian public.

Whether the conflict will end more quickly or drag on for another year depends solely on how much punishment the Russian people are willing to endure. Yes, Moscow and St. Petersburg and one or two other cities may be bathing in the largesse of the current spending spree lavished on the war, but this is not the entirety of the country nor of the population. Inflation, devaluation, stagnating economy, increasing poverty and declining birthrates are not issues easily addressed, nor can they be overlooked as cursory factors, especially in a time of war.

The Russian people’s capacity and willingness to suffer is legendary, allowing the ruling class to hang on to power longer than their cynicism or incompetence warrants. Putin is prepared to sacrifice the entire populace for the sake of power. Whether the people will be willing to send their men and children to the charnel house of war indefinitely is the great joker in the deck. The fact is that Russia is fighting this war not on quality but on quantity, the quantity of money and lives. The Russian leadership is intellectually and morally bankrupt, its economy one-dimensional, and its military outdated. The only resource the war effort relies upon is the common man’s willingness to die for no higher cause than Putin’s folly.

The Russian people have not been reared in aspiration but, rather, in desperation, the celebration of the virtue of a life of suffering ingrained in them from birth. Classical Russian literature revels in the virtue of suffering for a greater cause and deeper enlightenment.

“Suffering is a part of life, but it doesn’t have to define us. We can choose to rise above our suffering and find meaning in it.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The problem is that Russia is great at meting out suffering, not so much at providing meaning for it, and that is the crux of this conflict. Russian propaganda is working overtime to manufacture meaning for this war and, in the process, unabashedly conjuring false threats and enemies envious of Russia’s wealth. The narrative and justification shift time and again to accommodate the recurring setbacks both at the frontlines and in civilian life. No fig leaf is left unplucked in the effort to cover up the ruinous policies of the regime. No lie is left unspun in an effort to build up the fighting spirit of the nation for a war without meaning. Calls for nuclear strikes on London, Berlin and Washington are uttered so often as to have become banal.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is progressing more slowly than everyone hoped, but it is progressing and yielding results. Nevertheless, the mood in the West on the war is shifting. In an August 4 CNN poll of Americans, 55% now oppose additional support for Ukraine. People like Donald Trump, David Sacks, Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr., among others, are shilling the Russian propaganda narrative. They are peddling false facts to a population with only a cursory grasp of the complexity of this war and the relationship between the two countries. The anti-Ukraine advocates may have perfectly legitimate reasons for opposing continued support based on their preference to focus on domestic issues, of which the US has plenty, rather than international conflicts, but their line of argument serves the destructive purpose of giving legitimacy to Putin’s imperial and dictatorial aspirations.

In pushing their agenda, they deal in false facts taken right out of the Kremlin disinformation narrative. Their argumentation ranges from the tiresome misrepresentation of Nato expansion as overt aggression by the US rather than a desperate desire by nations long oppressed by Russia to secure their freedom, to secret bioweapons labs allegedly built on Ukrainian soil, to highly overstated Ukrainian casualty figures and complaints about the amount of US military aid which, in reality, is a drop in the country’s overall military budget.

Most destructive, however, is that they trivialise the very profound moral component of this war. In undertaking every effort to legitimise Putin’s grievances for the start of this conflict, they try to instill complexity where none exists, obfuscating the fact that, actually, it is simply a miscalculated act of naked aggression against a country that did not seek war. Putin launched an unprovoked attack against a neighboring country whose population, time and again, refused to mimic the slavishness of their Russian cousins. Full stop! Everything else is just window dressing.

Ukraine is problematic in that it has a long history of corruption and economic underperformance, and a rife kleptocracy. These deficiencies can not and should not be whitewashed, and they are not. The government's current anti-corruption campaign has its detractors, and there is reason to believe that it is driven in equal parts by a desire to curb corruption and a play to "redistribute" assets left dangling in the uncertainty of war. The politicians and oligarchs play their games in all circumstances, good or bad, but that is the nature of the beast. But this war is not about the politicians and the oligarchs, it is about the people. The politicians and the oligarchs may be rotten, but the Ukrainian people, en masse, are not.

The Ukrainians have historically been an unruly lot. An amalgamation of clans, they are infamous for their propensity to squabble and notoriously difficult to unite. Ukraine has a historical penchant for individual freedom, making its politics nasty and combative. Scenes from the Rada of deputies going at each other, sometimes with fists, are a testament to both the difficulty and the beauty of the Ukrainian spirit. It may not be pretty or genteel, but it is never slavish.

They have time and again chosen the chaos of democracy over a comfortable kleptocracy, Western ideals over autocratic oppression, and freedom over slavery. 89% of the population identify corruption as the number one problem facing their country. Soldiers fighting on the front lines are not dying to preserve a society that perpetuates a cozy relationship between the oligarchs and the state. They and the Ukrainian people are fighting for a chance to create a society that will be better than what it was before. They are fighting for a future different than the bleak nihilism offered by Putin. They are fighting for democracy, the rule of law, and economic prosperity. Because they are unified in that vision, they remain undaunted in their determination to fight until the end. When I speak to friends and relatives in Ukraine, the message is clear: “We are exhausted by the war, by the nightly air attacks, by the lives sacrificed by our soldiers, but we will never give up.”

This is not meant to be a soliloquy to the exceptionalism or ubiquitous goodness of the Ukrainian people. They are people, like everyone else, with their faults and weaknesses, good qualities and bad. But the one quality they have in spades is a dream to build a country upon the ideals of Western liberalism. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or the many other attempts to impose Western ideals on societies where they were neither wanted nor needed, Ukraine is a society striving for the freedom to implement our shared principles as a foundation for its future. As I have written before, there are not many moral wars being fought in the world, but this happens to be one, and for that reason alone, it is a cause worth supporting regardless of the cynical bylines being peddled with increasing fervor.

Alexander Kabanovsky is formerly a Russia-based banker and entrepreneur. This article first appeared on his substack “Thinking Out Loud” here.