With Ukrainian dead still lying on streets from Bucha to Kramatorsk, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Friday offered President Zelensky a sheaf of papers and told the wartime leader “this is where your path towards the European Union begins.” A nice gesture of solidarity, but the trophy strikes us, for one, as cheap, given the price in Ukrainian blood, and a poisoned chalice, to boot.

While Ms. von der Leyen was fiddling with the paperwork, the Prime Minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, the man who “got Brexit done,” made an unannounced visit to Kiev. With Mr. Zelensky, the British premier strolled the streets of the ancient capital, still reeking of cordite and the stench of blood. He promised 120 more armored vehicles and new missile defense systems. Now that’s tachlis. 

We wonder whether Ukraine’s future lies closer to Britain than Brussels. What’s the point of Ukraine muting its fiercely forged independence for the statist, non-democratic, regime of the European Union? We see the glimmer of a different strategy — holding out for a free market, open trading, sovereignty-based system, akin to the one for which Britain just quit the European Union. 

Why shouldn’t Ukraine cast its aspirations with those nations  determined to set their own course? The prime minister was roundly denounced when he compared Brexit to the war, but ballots and bullets are not foreign to each other. In Ukraine’s moment of testing, it has been forced to cut through the charade of European politics. It has exposed Russia as a pretender to a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

In calling Russia’s veto “the right to die” and suggesting that refusing to act would be tantamount to “closing the UN,” Mr. Zelensky has rightly fingered the ineptitude of a body formed to prevent exactly the kind of assault that it is now watching transpire. We applaud Russia’s expulsion from the UN’s Human Rights Council, but second Mr. Zelensky’s jibe that the move is the equivalent of treating cancer with aspirin.    

As NATO emerged at the dawn of the Cold War, so too this moment invites a realignment to counter newly emboldened foes. In the Middle East, Israel grows closer to its Arab neighbors to battle the ayatollahs of Tehran. As our Aleksandra Gadzala Tirzu reports, Finland finally is moving toward NATO membership. “I think that the Ukrainians have shown the courage of a lion,” Mr. Johnson said Saturday. Why not prowl the sunlit uplands of independence?