The President of Lithuania urges crossing red lines and I am beginning to reconsider the value of my apartment in Warsaw.

“I am really in favor of sending [fighter jets] and crossing all the red lines,” President Gitanas Naus�–da said before the European Council meeting last Thursday.

Naus�–da leads a country a little larger than West Virginia with a population a little less than Kansas. After WWII they were absorbed into the Soviet Union and treated as second class citizens in their own country.

Since the end of the Russian occupation they have had a generation of independence and rising prosperity. Which they fear they are about to lose.

I lived in Eastern Europe from 1991 to 2004. Mostly Poland but also Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and I spent a lot of time in Lithuania, Belarus, and generally knocking about the region. I supported myself by teaching English and editing manuscripts for publication in English-language periodicals for organizations such as the Polish Academy of Science.

And oh what a time it was! The sights, the adventures, the respect of men whose respect is worth having, and the girls!

I survived some things. I experienced real starvation in Bulgaria, and once received a beat down with real rubber truncheons and honest-to-God jackboots.

I remember the joy people felt when the Soviet empire fell and a shout of freedom arose across the continent. Followed by despair as they looked around and thought, “My God what a mess we have to clean up!”

But clean up they did, and became some of the fastest growing economies in the developing world. In doing to they forever destroyed the claim command economies can produce anything but poverty and misery.

I loved living there It’s where my son was born and I’ve always thought I’d go back to live someday.

Now I’m afraid it may not be there long.

Russia’s intentions are now clear. They intend to recapture several strategic geographical gaps, the natural invasion points into the Russian heartland.

None of them are in Ukraine. It’s just in the way. The invasion corridors from and to Europe lie in Poland and the Baltic coast.

The Ukrainians are fighting back better than anyone thought they could. But supplies are running low and by some depressing estimates they’ll have to kill 100,000 Russian soldiers in the near future just to stay in the fight.

The Poles are gearing up for the Russian arrival on their border, and opening their hearts and homes to Ukrainian refugees.

That’s amazing. In a continent where thousand-year-old grudges are cherished there is historically recent bad blood between Poles and Ukrainians.

My children’s great-grandmother was a courier for the WWII Armia Krajowe in her teens and once had to watch her uncle, aunt, and cousins murdered in front of her by Ukrainian partisans.

Now Polish friends tell me that’s all forgotten in the face of a common threat.

Entirely believable reports say in every city Ukraine has recaptured they’ve found torture chambers and mass graves. And alarmingly, children taken from their families to be sent back to Russia, presumably to be raised as Russians to replenish their diminishing population.

The degree to which we can help is limited. The “red line” spoken of is at what point will Russia use nukes.

And the will to help is… complicated. The Left hates Russia now that it’s not communist anymore but elements on the Right have embraced them for the same reason.

My opinion, Russia cannot win back their former empire. But in trying to they will destroy the world I loved.

— Steve Browne is a former reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent