On Ukraine’s border with Russia, residents confront a kaleidoscope of identities: former Soviet citizen, Russian speaker, Ukrainian national. The Monitor talked to some amid the sharpening tensions.

Candidate Joe Biden promised to tackle immigration with more compassion than his opponent. But carrying out that promise has been challenging, prompting us to ask: What makes it difficult to put compassion into action on the border?

The relationship between Poland and the European Union has turned bitter, so much so that some question if the country will look for the exit. A rural Polish village illustrates why it may remain.

James Manship is a George Washington interpreter, and he says that when the general shows up, conservatives pay attention. Understanding why the nation’s founding and the founders themselves resonate so deeply with them could open up lines of communication on difficult issues. 

The lesson of the apple tree is that even when nothing is happening, there’s something that must be done.

Foreign leaders are giving Vladimir Putin any number of reasons for Russia not to take Ukraine by force or other means. Yet the best advice may be coming from within Russia itself. In recent days, statements from two disparate groups, prominent liberal thinkers and former military officers, have described Kremlin provocations and threats against Ukraine as “criminal.” 

Russia will become a “pariah of the world community” if it invades its close neighbor, wrote retired Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, a former chief of military cooperation, on behalf of the All-Russian Officers Assembly. Meanwhile, more than 5,000 members of the Congress of Russian Intellectuals asked the Putin regime to avoid an “immoral, irresponsible, and criminal” war.

These warnings of a moral crisis for Russia were echoed in the United States this week when officials estimated an invasion could result in 25,000 to 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine. That possible violation of humanitarian law – part of the rules of war embedded in the 1949 Geneva Conventions – may give pause to Mr. Putin’s calculations of war. Ukraine has already begun to document cases of war crimes by pro-Russian combatants in the eastern region.

On top of any killing of noncombatants in Ukraine, Amnesty International warns of a mass migration to the West. “It is frightening to imagine what scale the refugee crisis could reach in the event of escalating hostilities in Ukraine. It will be a continent-wide humanitarian disaster with millions of refugees seeking protection in neighboring European countries,” said Agnès Callamard, the group’s secretary-general.

Russia has often backed protections for vulnerable civilians in conflict zones. In Syria’s war, it has backed a “humanitarian pause” to let trapped civilians escape the fighting. In 2017, it accused Ukraine’s government of killing Russian speakers in the eastern region.

Yet in 2019, Moscow walked away from a vital part of the Geneva Conventions that authorizes investigations into alleged war crimes against civilians. And it has ended its support of a 2005 United Nations doctrine known as Responsibility to Protect. That doctrine allows international intervention in countries that fail to protect mass killings of civilians. 

Still, Russia’s behavior hints Mr. Putin may be all too aware of the reputational costs of violating moral guardrails that prevent civilian harm. His taking of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, for example, was done by stealth incursion of Russian troops out of military uniform, or what NATO calls “unattributed warfare.” And U.S. officials speculate that Russia might use cyberattacks against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure or limit an invasion to the Russian-speaking territories

The idea that warring parties must recognize the innocence of civilians has taken hold in most countries over decades. It provides an essential legal bumper to prevent wars with no limits. It also promotes the universal principle of reverence for life. From both inside and outside Russia, that message may yet persuade Mr. Putin to hold his fire.