While many extraordinary American companies have voluntarily taken serious financial setbacks as their contribution to defending Ukraine—now the front line in a war on the Free World by Russian President Vladimir Putin—other companies have revealed themselves as indifferent at best.
Putin has curated a long track record of turning Grozny to rubble, flattening Aleppo, devouring Georgia and Crimea, and now has been dropping cluster and vacuum bombs, banned by the Geneva Conventions, on civilian targets in Ukraine. His troops have also attacked and taken over nuclear reactors, and Putin has repeatedly agreed to humanitarian evacuation routes that, when people emerge, the Russians shell—all in sub-zero, dead-of-winter weather. The problem: if Putin is allowed to take Ukraine, it will result in further annexations in Europe. The failure to contain aggressive acts results in further aggressive acts.
It is important immediately to follow the impressive example of worldwide heroes, above all, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. British Petroleum willingly absorbed a $25 billion loss. Elon Musk immediately made his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donated Starlink terminals to the people of Ukraine, in the event that their cyber capability was downed.
Musk also tweeted that the US must resume energy independence “immediately,” even though such a proposal would harm his Tesla electric car company:
“Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”
Musk followed up with:
“Obviously, this would negatively affect Tesla, but sustainable energy solutions simply cannot react instantaneously to make up for Russian oil & gas exports.”
Who, then, has been acting responsibly? Fortunately, according to Ariel Zilber in the New York Post, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, head of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale, has been compiling a list of 280 companies, so far, that have “scaled back their ties to Russia.”
According to the article, “[M]ajor brands… have come under intense pressure to cut business ties with Russia, as social users continue to express outrage over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
