I believe we all share your view /feelings for democracy and freedom on personal & domestic level. I am almost certain that a very big margin of people here supports Ukraine on personal level including me.
BUT
But here the main point is; the first thing thought to an IR student is, there is a clear distinction between domestic and international politics and the way they operate.
We may manage to go beyond pure Machiavellian understanding of early Realism by lets say Hans Morgenthau or Aron, yet still the concept of ''National interest'' is the key to understand international politics, only the definition of the concept became more and more vague and complex among IR scholars
Oh, this subject is challenge to keep it in Ukrainian war context, but lets give a try. The acronym IR is referring to International Relations, I assume?
Indeed, and perhaps I was unjust toward Gary by using words "democracy and freedom" exclusively in the context of internal politics. My aim was to keep this distinction clear, thank you for pointing it out.
Freedom, used within context of international relations, is often a shallow word. How many times Estonia is liberated from freedom under the slogan of "freedom": USSR liberating us from nationalism and capitalism in 1939; Germans liberating us from communism in 1941, USSR liberating us and so called Eastern Europe (Europe is separated from Asia somewhere behind Ural mountines) from nazis in 1945, Russia is liberating Ukraine from nazis again in 2022. So, again for a sake of clarity, lets agree that only Estonians can liberate Estonia, Ukrainians can liberate Ukraine and so forth. Russians can only occupy Ukraine, nothing more.
Democracy as a slogan in international relations tends to carry manipulative meaning also. Hereby a context means a lot. I believe Ukrainian soldiers fighting for democracy, but not Afghanis freedom fighters aiming the same. Perhaps I am unjust against so called traditional societies, but the culture and quality socio-economic relations within the nation should exceed certain critical level in order to acknowledge benefits of democracy. Democracy involves a lot of individualism, but also economic or societal values given higher value compared to religious or clann interest and so forth. Drastic change of attitude within the frames of occupation is not acceptable for any nation in any given time. It is like religion, one country cannot force a another country to accept democracy unless another country has freely chosen to do so.
