Permit me to offer my fellow conservatives a different perspective on Ukraine: What if their own families lived there, subject to the ever-preset danger of exploding drones and missiles raining down on their heads?

As famed Evangelical abolitionist William Wilberforce once declared,” You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

That means, you need to know what lies ahead if Kyiv falls.

As co-founder and CEO of a global church-empowerment network, I’ve witnessed the incredibly brave Ukrainian struggle for two years.

The CityServe International church network has distributed over three million meals, and supplied Ukrainian churches with generators so they can provide warmth and shelter whenever Russian missiles and drones knock out their electrical grid.

This summer we opened Kyiv’s first Family Center to provide urgently needed trauma care to families and veterans who’ve lost everything.

Having visited the frontlines in Ukraine several times, I’m quite concerned the current debate in Washington, D.C. appears blind to the brutal reality of what’s happening on the ground in the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.

The stories we’ve heard from Ukrainians are simply horrific.

Abductions, forced deportations, cluster bombing of civilian targets, the torture of Ukrainians POWs — all of these crimes are under investigation by the International Criminal Court.

To fully understand what’s happening, however, you have to go there and meet the victims. My fellow conservatives have chastened me to not speak out about this — or at least to bubble wrap my message for the good of the Republican Party.

But I can’t gaze at my three lovely daughters and remain silent regarding the rampant violence underway in temporarily occupied parts of Ukraine.

I’m certain the right thing for me to do is speak up.

While in Ukraine, I met a young man who’d been abducted by the Russians and held for three months. He was traumatized and initially refused to discuss what had happened.

Gradually, however, he opened up to tell me how the Russian soldiers repeatedly had molested him and forced him to perform sexual acts.

He said they openly bragged about how many women, young men, and children they had sexually violated.

I also stood beside a Ukrainian bishop at the site of the mass graves in Bucha.

Hundreds of gravestones were lined up off to the side, awaiting identification of the victims’ corpses. The bishop wept as he recounted that hundreds of civilians were tied up and shot, their bodies dumped into a mass shallow grave.

Later, after the shooting stopped, family members ventured out to mourn their lost loved ones. They hoped to retrieve the bodies. But it was just a trap.

As they wept beside the mass grave, Russian snipers stationed in a nearby multistory apartment complex opened fire.

They systematically shot and killed civilians as they were praying over their loved ones.

“It was what you Americans call a turkey shoot,” the bishop told me between sobs.

“As my parishioners agonized over the brutal deaths of their family members, they were shot and their bodies pushed into the hole.”

Lately we’re seeing “double-tap” attacks.

The Russians will launch a missile or drone attack at a civilian target, say an apartment building. As the sirens blare and loved ones scream for help, emergency medical crews race in to rescue survivors.

That’s when Vladimir Putin’s forces launch a follow-on salvo that hits 20-minutes later, decimating the first-responders who are focused on saving lives.

If that sounds like an international war crime to you, you’re right it is.

But that’s what’s happening in Ukraine everyday.

Now, I realize Americans tend to find these stories surreal.

It’s difficult to find words to characterize such soul-devouring evil.

But this inhumane nightmare is all too real.

If at this critical moment we Americans prioritize our political infighting over helping Ukrainians, we need to understand the damage to our global moral leadership will be incalculable.

The Russian way of war is nothing new, by the way. Consider Berlin in May 1945.

What followed after Soviet troops swept in to occupy the German capital was unimaginable. Historian Antony Beever writes it was “the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.”

Contemporaneous hospital records indicate at least 100,000 women were victims of sexual violence. Historians state some were raped up to 70 times, and over 10,000 German women subsequently died.

History records many chose to end their own lives rather than endure the endless, dehumanizing abuse.

Yet here’s a chilling thought: Those Soviet troops were paragons of military discipline compared to Russia’s present-day army, populated as it is by outcasts, criminal rejects, and prison parolees.

Today, the largest European conflict since WWII is raging in Ukraine. Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s right-hand lackey, recently declared, “Ukraine is definitely Russia.”

After all, no one can say you committed genocide against a people you say never existed, can they?

So here’s the bottom line: Our leaders must not sacrifice Ukrainians on the altar of their own political squabbles.

A Russian occupation would result in a wave of torture, abductions, mutilations, and castrations. Serial rapes of men, women, and children will be routine.

Putin’s insidious denial of Ukraine’s national identity sets the stage for a barbaric, post-war campaign of ethnic cleansing on a scale the modern world has never before witnessed.

This isn’t rank speculation.

This isn’t some dystopian plot line.

It’s the reality of the merciless, ravening evil that awaits Ukraine.

My fellow conservatives: Imagine your own family — your spouse or your son or your daughter — living right now in Ukraine. Please consider that before you vote on whether to provide funding.

But whatever you decide, don’t say you didn’t know.

Dave Donaldson is co-founder and CEO of the CityServe International church-empowerment network headquartered in Bakersfield, California.

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