• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I care a lot about Ukraine. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the independent, sovereign nation has caused more than a million casualties and is the most important world event in my lifetime, very much paralleling what Hitler’s 1938 invasion of Czechoslovakia meant for my parents' generation.

Ukraine and its defense have become important issues in my life, and not for typical reasons.

I don’t have family roots in Ukraine. I had never traveled there before two years ago. I had only done a tiny amount of business there before.

But I’m about to head back to Ukraine for my tenth trip since that first visit in mid-2023. My company now has more than 40 employees there in offices in Lviv and Kyiv. I have invested in a number of local start-ups there, mostly in defense tech. And I have made hundreds of new friends there, literally.

What brought me to Ukraine in the first place was a desire to make a difference, to show up and help grow partnerships between U.S. and Ukraine tech companies and entrepreneurs. What has kept going back to Ukraine are the people, the cause and what Ukraine’s survival means for America.

First, I have never met people more American than the people I’ve met and worked with in Ukraine. Everything we stand for, care about, enjoy and celebrate in America align more closely to people in Ukraine than any other country I’ve been (though Canadian values are super-close to ours, too).

Second, all of the values that America was built on are in play -- and under threat -- in Ukraine. The country was invaded because it is an independent, democratic nation no longer under the thumb of its autocratic, decaying, dictator-led neighbor to the north.

Third, thriving, independent, democratic nations in eastern and central Europe are critical to the future of Europe, and to the U.S. as well. We need more consumers and markets for our goods and services, and we need open and free trading zones to sell and service them. Bilateral trade between the U.S. and Europe is more than $1.4 trillion. If we lose even portions of that trade, U.S. companies, workers and taxpayers will suffer enormously.

Fourth, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Russia is supported in its invasion and daily attacks on Ukraine civilians with direct material, weapons and military support from Iran, North Korea and China. The first two are self-avowed enemies of the U.S., and the third is intent on pushing the U.S. out of its position of dominance in world trade and powerful influence in the western Pacific and Asia.

Fifth, America and its allies are vulnerable. Twenty-five years of fighting terrorism and counterinsurgency wars, spending a “peace dividend" that has never been properly funded, and opening our markets up to free trade without appropriate access to many global markets have made America more vulnerable economically, politically and militarily than it has been since the 1930s.

Witness our political polarization, the craziness of tariff-driven trade wars, and attempts to grow our economy without a rational and functioning immigration policy.

Most critically, however, from a point of American vulnerability, is fragility surrounding our national security -- and recognizing that the threats we are soon to face are being created, tested and optimized on the battlefield in Ukraine on a daily basis.

In less than an hour last Sunday, Ukraine launched an extraordinary operation with just over 117 remotely operated drones (costing less than $2,000 each), and disabled or destroyed one-third of the Russian strategic bomber fleet (worth $7 billion) in four different airfields, each many hundreds or thousands of miles deep into Russia territory.

What happened last week can happen in the U.S. if the technology, well-known and proven, is used by our enemies. All the materials are available in the U.S. The techniques are well known to many of the nation states and proxies who seek to hurt America, with Iran and North Korea at the top of the list (not to mention Russia and China).

The U.S. is very vulnerable today, not just to misinformation and disinformation attacks, as we have seen over the recent past. But, we are now becoming much more vulnerable to kinetic attacks, as we see unfolding in Ukraine.

Helping Ukraine doesn’t mean U.S. boots on the ground. First and foremost, Ukraine needs money. We now have a vehicle in place to make it self-funding through the minerals agreement. Second, Ukraine needs our intelligence capabilities. The more we share and learn with Ukraine’s forces on the ground, the more we can better prepare ourselves for what we might see in the Taiwan straits, or an airbase in Nebraska.

Third, they need weapons and can do a lot with obsolete ones like F-16s and the 10,000 Bradley fighting vehicles that we have in storage. And fourth, we can sanction companies that keep giving Russia money to bomb Ukraine civilians and kidnap their children. A bipartisan bill to that end is soon to be brought before the U.S. Senate.

We can also use both carrots and sticks to make sure  our European allies don’t just “talk the talk” on Ukraine defense, but “walk the walk.”

We all need to care about Ukraine -- and help in its defense -- not just because it is the right thing to do. It is. But also because it is the best thing to do for America.