Why Should Conservatives Support Ukraine? I Asked a Populist Leader in Europe.

WARSAW — With some on the populist right in the United States agitating against aid to Ukraine, I asked the leader of a populist conservative government in Europe why American conservatives should support Ukraine.

“It is very simple,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told me last week. “Right now, Russian imperialism can be stopped cheaply, because American soldiers are not dying.” But if we don’t put a halt to Russian aggression now, “there will be a very high price to be paid.”

During an hour-long conversation in the Presidential Palace here, Duda noted that Poles have experienced 600 years of Russian efforts to subjugate them and their neighbors. In the 18th century, Russia helped partition Poland, wiping it off the map for 123 years. In 1920, the Bolsheviks attacked “in the hope of spreading communism across the whole of Europe” but were stopped by Polish forces in the Battle of Warsaw. In 1939, the Soviets attacked again alongside Nazi Germany and “Stalin seized half of Poland, bringing it under Soviet occupation” — until Hitler turned on his Soviet allies. Then in 1945, the Red Army retook Poland and “pushed the German occupiers out only to replace them with their own occupation,” resulting in “an additional 44 years behind the Iron Curtain.”

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