IZIUM, Ukraine — Inna Osipova pointed to the 30-foot pile of rubble that is all that’s left of her apartment building. She and her 5-year-old son narrowly escaped when Russian shelling destroyed the structure, but her grandmother did not and is interred somewhere in the wreckage. Osipova hopes her body will be found so she can be given a proper burial.

Her voice cracked with emotion, but she held together until I asked what she thought of Americans who say it’s time to move on from supporting Ukraine.

“We’re people, you understand,” she said, and she began weeping. “It doesn’t matter if we’re Ukrainian or American — such things should not happen.” And then she was crying too hard to continue.

These areas in northeastern Ukraine, recently liberated after months of Russian occupation, show what’s at stake as some Americans and Europeans seek to trim assistance for Ukraine. There are bombed-out buildings, survivors cooking over open fires outside, children injured by land mines, freshly vacated Russian torture chambers — 23 discovered so far here in the Kharkiv region alone — along with mass graves of corpses with hands tied and shattered limbs.

While President Vladimir Putin of Russia seems unable to break the spirit of Ukrainians, he is already shattering the will of some Americans and Europeans.

“Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine,” says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the firebrand Republican. The Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, says that it’s time to end the “blank check” for Ukraine.

The atrocities provide a moral reason to support Ukraine, but there’s also a practical reason to do so.

“Ukrainian resistance provides extraordinary security benefits to Americans,” noted Timothy Snyder, a Ukraine expert at Yale. “The least we can do is be on our own side.”

U.S. military planners have long worried about a Russian attack on Baltic countries in NATO. But at enormous cost in lives, Ukraine has so degraded Russia’s armed forces that the risk of that today is far lower.

Ukraine’s resistance may also increase the possibility that Putin himself will be toppled.

The most important way in which Ukraine is arguably making the world safer is farther to the east. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, China could take that as a warning and be less likely to move on Taiwan, reducing the risk of a cataclysmic war between the United States and China.

A simple slogan captures the dynamic: “If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no more Ukraine.”

I’ll give the last word to Alla Kuznietsova, 52, a chatty woman who is a senior manager in the Izium gas bureau. She said she had secretly communicated Russian positions to the Ukrainian side during the occupation, at enormous risk.

In July, Russian troops arrested her and her husband for other reasons, including her tendency to speak openly around town about the prospect of liberation from Russian occupation. She said that for 10 days, she and her husband were held in separate cells on a Russian military base and subjected to electric shocks and repeated beatings with cables.

Kuznietsova said she was also repeatedly stripped naked and raped by interrogators and sexually humiliated in an attempt to break her spirit. That almost worked: At one despairing moment, she said, she tried to hang herself by her bra but failed.

In the end, the Russians caved first. They found that they needed her to run the town’s gas supply and told her that they would release her. “I said, ‘I will not leave without my husband,’” she recalled, so they freed her husband as well.

Instead of helping the Russians with the gas supply, Kuznietsova made a daring escape with her husband in the only direction possible: to Russia. She talked her way through checkpoints and then crossed into Estonia and finally traveled through Poland to Ukraine. She just returned to newly liberated Izium after a month of outpatient treatment in a Ukrainian hospital for her torture injuries.

I asked her about the West’s fatigue with the war.

Kuznietsovaseemed to struggle to come to grips with Americans’ fatigue with even a distant conflict. She told me she didn’t understand American elections, but her voice broke — in a way it did not when she recounted being beaten, shocked, raped and humiliated — as she expressed fear that the West might abandon Ukraine.

“We are grateful to Americans, but we just ask, please don’t leave us halfway,” she said. “Don’t leave us alone.”

This is Nicholas Kristof’s first column since returning to The New York Times after leaving in 2021 to run for governor of Oregon.