Democracy or dictatorship? The moral call to defend Ukraine

Abstract

This essay is a reflection on the Ukraine war grounded in moral motives to empathetically support an attacked victim (whether at the individual or national level). It entails a critique of the moral abstraction of the geopolitical perspective and an analysis of Putin’s imperial Eurasian ideology, including Dugin’s cultural essentialism and the biopolitical strategies of its implementation. Current calls for peace, ceasefire or diplomacy appear problematic in this light. The need to articulate normative principles orienting negotiations with morally acceptable results becomes apparent, as they both justify the use of effective military means of empathetic solidarity and limit the dangers of an unchecked militarization and bellicose attitudes in this conflict.