The first rule of canceling Russia should be: If a given action is likely to harm innocents without any meaningful benefit to Ukraine, that’s a needless excess, not a necessary evil.

Violations of the rule are popping up everywhere. The Washington Post reports that “in the Czech Republic, where people still recall the trauma of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, recent social media posts have suggested Russian citizens ‘should be visibly marked, maybe with a red star.’ The morning after the invasion, a Prague university professor wrote on Facebook that he would not teach or test Russian students.” The New York Times reports that “Russian restaurants in New York City have a public relations problem. Even though many of the owners are openly against the war, or are even Ukrainian, they are getting burned by reservation cancellations, social media campaigns and bad reviews.”

Treating Russian nationals in this way is cruel. And as Dan Kois persuasively argues in Slate, it also undermines Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to appeal directly to individual Russians’ honor and desire for peace. “Many Russians living abroad despise this war and the regime that has instigated it,” Kois notes. “Those Russian émigrés are a direct line to the Russian citizens whose resistance to the conflict and recognition of the rights of Ukraine could be crucial in bringing the war to an end.”