That’s the choice with which Ukraine is faced, at least according to Jillian Kay Melchior in her Wall Street Journal editorial. She summarized her view of the matter near the end of her piece.

That’s the temptation Ukraine faces as it considers sacrificing some territories ostensibly to save others. Many Ukrainians have loved ones in occupied regions, notes Yulia Marushevska, a Defense Ministry official: “Giving it up is not giving it up to keep it quiet there. It’s giving them up for destruction. It’s giving up your friend or brother.”

But that’s not the choice Ukraine presently faces. As the Russian state-owned and run outlet, RIA Novosti, put it in a headline as recently as 30 July,

There is no other option: no one should remain alive in Ukraine[.]

(It would help if Melchior had actually read the article in the original Russian or as translated into English. The headline she so carefully singled out is the outlet’s sarcastic summarization of its distortionate view of Ukrainian and Western persistence: Ukrainians must fight to the last soul. The article, though, does tout the Russian intent on encouraging that outcome if it’s what’s necessary for the barbarian to occupy the terrain.)

Nor is the article just editorial hype. The barbarian is bent on extermination of Ukraine as a polity and as a culture.

• Putin is working to “eliminate Ukraine as a language and ethnicity, as an identity and culture, and as an independent state”
• in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, retreating Russians left behind mass graves and civilian bodies bearing signs of torture, sexual violence and summary executions
• Ukrainian authorities say they have information about nearly 20,000 cases in which Ukrainian children have been kidnapped to Russia

There is no Sophie’s choice for Ukraine here. Sophie had a choice: pick one of two children for the Nazis to murder. Ukraine has only national and cultural suicide on offer from the barbarian. Not some fraction of the nation to be murdered, but all of it.

It is the West—the Trump administration and Europe’s NATO member nations—which are faced with Sophie’s choice: pick one of several (so far, only Eastern European) nations for the Russian barbarian to murder in exchange for a phantom peace that would be nothing more than a small period of relative quietude.

There is, though, an actual choice. This one begins with changing the rhetoric from “Ukraine must be helped to fight on” and the more recent “cease fire right damn now” to “Ukraine must win.” That must be supported by overt and rapid transfers of arms and logistic support to Ukraine in the numbers and types the UA—with its superior and more current battlefield experience—says it needs and at the pace it says it needs them. Further, those transfers must come with no restrictions on the types and locations of targets against which the UA might employ them.