What’s at stake in the war between Russia and Ukraine? John Berkowitz’s guest column (“End Ukraine war before it ends us,” Gazette, Dec. 4) implies that any time a powerful authoritarian regime wants to invade a smaller neighbor, the world should let it, in order to get “peace in our time.” That’s what Chamberlain, the British prime minister, said in 1937 when he and the French signed a chunk of Czechoslovakia over to Hitler. We know what happened next.

Russia has nuclear weapons. The writer’s suggestion (force Ukraine to negotiate) is dangerous today because it tells dictators with nuclear weapons that they can invade their neighbors with impunity. But the U.S. would not stand by while China invaded Taiwan or North Korea invaded South Korea. So the risk of nuclear war is actually increased by caving in to nuclear blackmail.

Look back: In February 2022, Russia, a country of 143 million people with, as the above-mentioned column says, “more manpower, military industrial production capacity, and advanced technology” than Ukraine, invaded that small democracy (44 million) with absolutely no provocation.

Honest Vlad Putin claimed he was “de-Nazifying” the country. This, from a dictator supported by billionaire oligarchs, his controlled news media, and rigged elections, who has killed and jailed his critics. After the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country, especially journalists and intellectuals. They knew he was lying, they knew what would happen to them if they said so and they didn’t want to risk their lives fighting for a lie.

Putin has also claimed that Ukraine isn’t a country at all, it’s part of Russia. Unfortunately for Putin, the Ukrainians didn’t think so. When the Russian tanks arrived, they did not say, “Thank you for liberating us from our elected president, that Jewish Nazi Volodymyr Zelensky (Zelensky is Jewish), hail President Putin! Peace!”

They blew up the tanks. They have no desire to be Russian. They want to be an independent country, part of democratic Europe. That’s why they revolted against a repressive Putin puppet in 2014, a revolt they call “the revolution of dignity.” (Read Timothy Snyder, who teaches the history of Ukraine at Yale, or check out “Maidan” in Wikipedia).

Many Ukrainians volunteered to fight and two years later, they are still fighting. Women are working in underground shelters to make things for the troops. They have repelled Russian assaults on many sectors, inflicting 500,000 estimated casualties on the invaders, recently taking positions “on the east bank of the Dnipro River, posing a threat to Russia’s dominance of the region.” (New York Times, Dec. 2.) And at the price of heavy casualties, including over 9,000 civilians.

In Russia, Putin had to promise freedom to convicts who would fight in Ukraine; now he’s drafting them in droves. Russia has committed well-documented war crimes, torturing and murdering prisoners and civilians in towns they occupied. Do you think Ukraine wants to “negotiate” by giving their towns and cities to these murderers? Any government that did that would be immediately deposed by the Ukrainian people.

It is never a good idea to give in to blackmail: the blackmailer can always come back for more. Putin has said he envisions a “greater Russia” beyond present borders. If Putin negotiates “peace” to get, say, a fifth of Ukraine, why would he stop? Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were once part of the USSR.

Next targets? Poland was once part of the Russian Empire. Russia’s neighbors are fearful and that’s why they drew closer to the European Union and NATO.

Putin is an unscrupulous liar. But he is not crazy. He knows nuclear war would be not only end us, as Mr. Berkowitz’s column implies, but end them, and him. Let us negotiate nuclear arms reduction with him. Don’t push a small democracy to negotiate away their country.

Support for Ukraine may be wavering. Republicans are pushing us to abandon it. As Timothy Snyder said to lawmakers, freedom has declined around the world. Things got so bad that a dictatorship actually invaded a democracy with the goal of destroying its freedoms and its people.

But this people fought back. Its leaders stayed in the country. Their armed forces held back a seemingly overwhelming force. Would you sell them out?

David Ball lives in Northampton.