The Russia-Ukraine war is a useless waste of life unless you value freedom and the individual even more. 

Some 728,000 Russians are dead or injured, and many Ukrainians, mostly civilians, have met a similar fate. 

According to an estimate from The Economist, approximately 2% of all Russian men between the ages of 20 and 50 may have been killed or seriously wounded in Ukraine since February 2022. 

For comparison, the equivalent American cohort would be 66 million. 

What would the mood of our country be if over 1.3 million of our young were dead or maimed? 

For perspective, over the course of the 21-year-long Afghanistan war, 22,659 Americans were killed or injured, which includes many non-combat accidents.

Anyone who makes light of the sacrifices and suffering going on in Ukraine is a heartless and manipulated fool. 

This must stop, and tyrants cannot be rewarded. The blame rests on Joe Biden, for making the world less safe through his actions and non-actions.

The usual peaceniks visible in every other war since the 1960s have been silent. They are so ever-present and loud, though, in another war with far fewer civilian deaths, which is the one Israel is engaged in in Gaza and beyond. Is a Gazan worth more than a Ukrainian? 

All the while, the leaders of Western civilization plot a course of least resistance that can be measured by the loss of stature we'll all face when the final shot rings out over a defeated Ukraine, a resurgent Russia, and a lot of nations wondering if America has lost its mojo once and for all. 

There's a lot at stake, folks. 

History will remember the leadership, policy, and miscalculations that coaxed Putin into believing he'd do a walkover that fateful morning in February 2022 when 125,000 troops and mechanized forces planned to take Kyiv and the rest of the country in a week. 

A defeated Ukraine signals Western weakness and invites more aggression.  Putin and Xi watched in disbelief at how we allowed our petty infighting and false priorities to take on more importance than our culture's very survival.  

It's less about who's right and wrong and more about how the West did not rise to the occasion, allowing this predictable and avoidable cataclysm from happening and the ultimate ramifications of what failed American and European leadership means for our children's future.  

A 'permissive' environment in warfare is an operational setting where forces can expect little to no interference with their operations.  President Biden gave such a signal that, like the taking of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, America and Europe would bluster but, at the end of the day, would not act. 

Remember Biden's statement directed at Putin in January of 2022:

"I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do."

Biden exhibited the worst qualities of a national leader, literally serving up Ukraine like a meal of Chicken Kyiv, signing a hunting license to Putin. 

How else to read the room than the leader of the free world telling an aggressor poised to invade a non-combative nation, and President Biden says something that can be considered tacit approval for a limited incursion? 

Biden should have been impeached; instead, a month later, about the time it would take to issue invasion orders after Biden's pass, brutal, deadly, unlimited war revisited Europe after a 78-year absence.  

Astoundingly, Ukraine and the West never had a plan to win the war in Ukraine.

The question is how do we salvage ourselves from the morass we created all by ourselves and now marks us as feckless quitters, with example after example, the Afghanistan exit being prominent, how we undermined Israel politically and militarily on the stage of public opinion and forced it to follow the same failing policies that hamstring ourselves, i.e., winning in war is secondary to public opinion. 

Most importantly, giving Putin the go-ahead to kill tens of thousands of civilians, starve them, freeze them in winter, and take their children back to Russia to be reeducated and become 'good' Russians is intolerable.  War crimes abound, and all our armchair generals pay lip service to the foundational mistakes in foreign policy we've made.  I hope God forgives Biden; I won't.  

God bless America.

Allan J. Feifer is a patriot, author, businessman, thinker, and strategist.  Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com.

Image: Jason Lam, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed