By Damon Linker, The Week

In his address to Congress Wednesday morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made a powerful, heartrending appeal for additional aid, including a no-fly zone and additional weaponry, to help his country defend itself against Russia’s invasion.

The U.S. government should keep imposing painful economic sanctions on Russia and sending defensive weapons to Ukraine. But nothing in Zelensky’s emotionally potent presentation should change President Biden’s rejection of a no-fly zone and more escalatory moves on the ground in Ukraine.

That line might prove difficult to hold. As the world has learned in the three weeks since Russia’s invasion began, Zelensky is a charismatic leader whose extraordinary courage is his country’s most formidable asset against Russia’s aggression. On Wednesday, he pulled out all the rhetorical stops, both verbally and visually, in making his case for stepped up American assistance.

He began by evoking America’s relatively few memories of the horror of aerial bombardment — at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Imagine the shock and terror of those mornings continuing through the afternoon and evening and on through the days and weeks to come — that’s the chilling thought Zelensky tried to plant in the minds of his audience before asking (in language drawn from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) for the U.S. to impose a humanitarian no-fly zone.

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