Below are Leon Wieseltier’s opening remarks at the Ukraine: Thinking Together conference in Kiev, given on May 17. We will be publishing other contributions from the conference in the coming days.

This gathering in Kiev is the result of a casual remark. Last March, as I watched the progress of Putin’s imperialism beyond his borders and fascism within his borders, I ruefully remarked to Frank Foer that the moment reminded me of what I used to call my Congress for Cultural Freedom-envy—my somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals, some of whom became my teachers and my heroes, against the Stalinist assault on democracy in Europe. And all of a sudden, pondering the Russian aggression in Crimea, and the Russian campaign of destabilization in Ukraine, I realized that I had exaggerated my belatedness. I was not born too late at all. Our time is not lacking for fundamental historical challenges and the obligation to choose sides. Passivity—even sympathetic passivity—in the face of a war on freedom is as inadequate now as it was then. So I exclaimed to my friend, “But this is 1950!” As our predecessors went to Berlin, so we would go to Kiev. We contacted our comrade Timothy Snyder, whose eloquence about Ukraine has been fully the equal of his scholarship, and I proposed this event. Tim kindled instantly to the idea, and, with his extraordinary colleagues in Vienna and Kiev, we made a plan. And here we are.

All historical analogies are imperfect, but they are not for that reason false. The analogy between 2014 and 1950 is in some ways imprecise and hyperbolic: Putin is not Stalin, for example. But Putin is bad enough. Putin is very bad. It is not only evil in its worst form that we must resist. The discontinuities of recent histories must not blind us to the continuities. It is also the case—here is another discontinuity—that the United States and its European allies are not inclined now toward a geopolitical struggle that would in any way resemble the Cold War, which many Westerners regard as a dark and cautionary tale. I am not one of those Westerners: Unlike many American liberals, among whom I otherwise count myself, I regard the Cold War as a mottled tale of glory, because it ended in the defeat and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, which was indeed (for American liberals this is a heretical prooftext) what Ronald Reagan said it was—an evil empire. Some of us have been agitating back home for a more powerful Western response to Putin’s depredations in Ukraine; others among us have been more patient with the pace and the modulation of the American and European policy. But the discussion of policy must be preceded by a discussion of principle. The Russian war on Ukraine is one of the proving grounds of principle in our time. The Maidan is one of the primary sites of the modern struggle for democracy. History sometimes provides hours and circumstances that expose, and test, one’s beliefs, and the beliefs of the politics and the culture of one’s society. The crisis in Ukraine is such an hour and such a circumstance. Here in Kiev you are not only clarifying yourselves; you are also clarifying us.

The Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West, its unintimidated preference for Europe over Russia, is not merely a strategic and economic choice; it is also a moral choice, a philosophical choice, a societal decision about ideals, a defiance of power in the name of justice, a stirring aspiration to build a society and a state that is representative of some values and not others. We have come to Kiev because we accept what you accept and we reject what you reject—because we share the principles that you have elected to represent. We have come to say that we admire your revolution for those principles—not because they are ours but because they are right; because they are justified by reason and by decency; because they are, conceptually if not yet historically, universal. In America and in Europe, it no longer requires courage to champion these principles—the spectacle of our complacencies is plain for all to see; and so we are genuinely humbled by your courage, by your ethical obduracy, by your spiritual preparedness for the dangers and the obstacles and the cruelties that await you along your road to democracy.

So what are these principles?