Tell President Biden and your Members of Congress: Support the Ukrainian People with Aid and Sanctions

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

President Biden and Democratic members of Congress, I thank you for your clear and sound responses to the Ukraine War and your acknowledgement that any attack on a NATO ally is an attack on all.

Use the points that most matter to you, call more than once, or use them all.

I support providing emergency military and humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian people through normal State Department, international, and NGO channels. But I oppose any permanent shift of domestic spending to the Pentagon budget as Republicans are now demanding.

I strongly oppose any active military engagement in the Ukraine war by U.S. combat forces, such as a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine. "No-fly" is "war" by another name, and it risks a wider European conflict that Putin might well escalate to nuclear weapons.

A direct shooting war between NATO and Russia provides propaganda cover for Putin by allowing him to disguise his naked aggression against Ukraine as "defensive." And rather than protecting Ukraine, it would politically free Putin to ruthlessly wreak even greater destruction.

I support the ban on importing Russian oil and gas, even if that means a significant increase in gasoline prices. I urge that oil be released from the strategic reserve to stabilize prices. And if necessary to prevent price-gouging by Big Oil, I call on you to impose mandatory price controls pegged to world benchmark prices.

Since oil and gas exports make up a significant percentage of the Russian economy, I urge you to aggressively promote environmental and economic policies that reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. If Senators Manchin and Sinema continue to ally themselves with Republicans to block climate emergency measures, I urge you to make maximum use of your executive powers even if doing so upsets the GOP.

I recognize that stopping Russia with sanctions is going to impose costs on the American economy. Instead of dodging, disguising, and denying, it's high time for Democrats to begin clearly and publicly defending the liberal concepts of the "common good" and "shared sacrifice," and to forthrightly oppose Republican praise for, and glorification of, individual selfishness and greed. You can also help the American people deal with these costs by immediately reinstating the Childcare Tax Credit.

I support Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Ukrainians already in the U.S. and I support welcoming Ukrainian war refugees to America. To that end, the U.S. should follow the EU’s lead and allow Ukranians to bypass the usual asylum process. I also call on you to offer the same TPS protection to people from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean who are fleeing natural disasters, political persecution, and drug cartel violence, because is morally indefensible to deny people of color the same refuge that is offered to white Europeans.

Background

For two weeks, with horror and anguish, we've watched the autocrat Putin wield Russian military might to grind down and destroy the fragile democracy that the Ukrainian people are struggling to create. Their fledgling democracy and more equitable economy posed a political threat to the continued misrule of Putin and his oligarch cronies because the Russian people might see in Ukraine an example that they could follow. According to military experts, the grim reality Ukrainians and the world now face is that once the Russian army manages to encircle the major population centers of Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa, and others, cutting them off from resupply and electricity, Putin will pound them into submission with hunger and mass indiscriminate shelling and bombing, just as he has twice done to the city of Grozny in Chechnya and then to Aleppo in Syria.

America and our NATO allies have responded to Putin's naked aggression with unprecedented economic, political, and cultural sanctions, massive military aid, and large-scale humanitarian support. As of this week, the U.N. reports that more two million Ukrainians – mostly women, children, and seniors – have fled to safety in neighboring European nations. That amounts to 5% of the total population (the equivalent of more than 16 million Americans). The number of refugees is expected to rise dramatically in the coming weeks. The Biden administration has extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to the estimated 75,000 Ukrainian citizens already in the U.S. on temporary student, tourist, and work visas. Whether additional Ukrainians can be admitted to the U.S. as refugees depends to some degree on public political support against the nativism of the hard-right Republican base.

Membership in NATO is based in part on the idea that any attack on any NATO nation will be met with unified military action and war against the attacker by all the NATO allies as required by Section 5 of the NATO Treaty. But Ukraine is not a NATO ally. President Biden and our European allies have stated that they will not engage in direct combat with Russia in Ukraine, because doing so would trigger a much larger, potentially catastrophic war that could easily escalate to using nuclear weapons, resulting in utter devastation and global disaster. Painful as it is for us to watch the horrors being inflicted on the Ukrainian people, a wider NATO-Russia war would free Putin politically to commit even worse atrocities against them.

Many people who are sincerely concerned for the Ukrainian people are calling on NATO to impose a "no-fly zone" over the battlefield so that Russia cannot use its airpower against the Ukrainian resistance. The term "no-fly zone" sounds safe, but what it means is U.S. and NATO jets shooting down Russian planes and helicopters and Russians retaliating in kind. It also means air strikes against Russian soldiers on the ground, because a no-fly zone cannot be established without first destroying Russian anti-aircraft missiles and batteries like those in the notorious 40 Mile convoy. The word for all of that is "war." For their part, Republican politicians are mendaciously pounding the war drums and yelling for a no-fly zone as a way of painting Biden and the Democrats as "weak." In their zeal to score political points, they don't care who they hurt or what risks they run.

Furthermore, those promoting military engagement like establishing a no-fly zone are ignoring the crucial fact that a direct shooting war between NATO and Russia would provide propaganda cover for Putin by allowing him to disguise his naked aggression against Ukraine as "defensive." Rather than protecting Ukraine, it would give him an excuse to wreak even greater destruction.

Sanctions are the pressure points we have for influencing Putin and Russia. Oil and gas exports are the foundation of the Russian economy and provide the wealth to finance its war machine, so we need to ban Russian oil/gas imports and resist pressure from Big Oil (and other special interests) to weaken sanctions to protect their profits. Wars always cause the world price of oil to rise, and Big Oil races to take advantage by immediately increasing prices even on supplies purchased long before the conflict, then keeping consumer costs high long after prices have normalized. They should not be allowed to pull that trick again.