RKSL
The Frontline
Oct 5, 2025
Should Ukraine step aside and allow Russian drones and missiles and tanks to roll into Paris, Berlin, and Prague? That is the reality implied by the posture of the West. Ukraine is already the shield, already the line of defense that absorbs the destruction meant for others. Every night Kharkiv and Lviv are torn apart so that the capitals of NATO can remain untouched. Every blackout in Odesa is the price of what the West still dares to call its security. And yet the truth is larger than Europe. Ukraine is not only defending territory; it is defending the possibility of democracy itself. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, it is not only European order that collapses. It is the credibility of democratic self-defense everywhere.
The obscenity lies in the contrast, for while Ukraine is being systematically destroyed in the service of global democracy, while its cities burn and its people endure the annihilation that comes with missile fire and drone swarms, the United States has chosen this week not to bind itself more deeply to Ukraine’s survival but instead to extend NATO-style guarantees to the monarchy of Qatar. A monarch gifted Donald Trump a shiny new plane, and he rewarded that gesture with an executive order pledging to defend Qatar as though it were an ally bound by Article 5. Years of Ukrainian sacrifice have not secured such a guarantee. An airplane in the hands of a president did.
The gluttonous members of NATO, long fed to obesity and now slimmed by Ozempic to create the appearance of fitness, gorge themselves on the safety Ukraine provides while refusing to acknowledge the cost. They hold conferences and issue declarations while a nation is torn apart on their behalf. Their comfort rests on Ukraine’s ruin, and still they withhold the recognition that Ukraine’s survival is the only measure of whether democracy in the world has any defense left.
Ukraine has never demanded the instant invocation of Article 5; the elemental protection that should already have been provided is that the skies above its towns and cities not be left open to the drones and missiles that tear them apart night after night. That obligation should not even require a request, for it is the minimum duty of those who claim to defend democracy, yet it is precisely what the allies refuse to confront. They repeat phrases about strengthening their eastern flank against the Russian horde, as though that flank were an abstraction on a map, when in truth their eastern flank is Ukraine itself, bleeding and burning before their eyes. Every strike on Lviv, every fire in Odesa, every blackout in Kharkiv is the demonstration of that truth, and the refusal to act is not strategy, not prudence, but complicity in the destruction of the very democracy that holds their line.
What we are left with is the collapse of obligation into barter, the degradation of alliance into vanity, and the reduction of democracy’s defense to a transaction in which a monarch’s gift is valued above the sacrifice of a nation. It is the inversion of every principle the West claims to uphold, with blood and rubble dismissed as expendable and spectacle and favor elevated to the
level of covenant. The democracies that congratulate themselves on their vigilance are gluttonous in their safety, blind in their indulgence, and unwilling to recognize that their own survival is already being purchased in Ukrainian lives.