Winning a war takes sacrifice.

Ukrainian soldiers and citizens have inspired the world with their willingness to give everything — including, tragically, their lives — to defend their nation against the Russian invasion.

The West has rightly rallied to their cause. And while it's near nothing compared to the existential ordeal Ukrainians face, Americans must also muster a spirit of sacrifice, including in paying higher gas prices that are partly, although certainly not fully, a result of the war.

The most direct link came with President Joe Biden's Tuesday announcement that the U.S. would ban Russian oil and other energy imports. After levying extensive sanctions to nearly every other aspect of Russia's economy, it's the logical, and right, move. Energy fuels Russia's economy — and President Vladimir Putin's war machine. Reducing this revenue raises the economic and political cost of Putin's war of choice.

Not every Western country can contribute in the same way, a fact acknowledged by the Biden administration. The U.S. imports only a small fraction of its oil and petroleum products from Russia. Europe is far more dependent, and thus many continental countries announced aggressive but more gradual phaseout goals.

The U.S. ban comes amid a worldwide supply-demand imbalance that predates the war. Much of it was caused by a quicker-than-expected rebound in demand that came from COVID mitigation measures. Before that, oil prices and production had plunged, and didn't recover quickly enough to match more confident consumers' understandable desire to revert to normal life.

"As we come out of COVID, people want to fly more, they want to drive more, they want to get out," Alfred Marcus, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, told an editorial writer. Marcus, author of "Managing Strategic Uncertainty: Booms and Busts in the Energy Industry," added that among other factors fueling the rise in gas prices was a prior agreement between OPEC and Russia to restrict supply and thus raise the price of oil, as well as other oil-rich repressive regimes, particularly Iran and Venezuela, being sanctioned or shunned. And many domestic producers' business models were upended with the COVID curtailment of energy use and have not yet ramped up to reflect the new supply-demand dynamics.

Biden had been less encouraging to the industry than many previous presidents, mostly due to another threat: climate change. But today's shortage is not directly the result of last year's cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which was not scheduled to be completed until 2023. Nor is it the outcome of Biden temporarily stopping new drilling leases on federal lands in January of 2021, since a federal judge blocked the move just months later, and the permits are for production a few years in advance.

In fact, it's notable that as recently as December, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told oil executives attending a National Petroleum Council event to "please take advantage of the leases that you have, hire workers, get your rig count up."

U.S. producers should indeed heed these words. Domestic, not despot, sources should reflect the democratic values espoused in rallying support for Ukraine.

To alleviate the pain at the pump — which is real, and particularly hard on lower-income consumers — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has joined several other Democratic governors in calling for a federal gas-tax holiday. This may be good politics, but it's not good policy: The tax revenue is needed for federal expenditures, and the deficit is already unsustainable. Most profoundly, passing off even more debt to future generations for current consumption is the antithesis of the spirit shown by the Greatest Generation that sacrificed so much to fight totalitarianism during World War II. The sacrifices needed now are minor by comparison. We can, and should, bear them.

It's deeply disappointing to see so many Republicans vote to ban Russian energy imports, which they know will have an inflationary effect on gas prices, only to immediately turn around and try to score political points by blasting Biden. Particularly shameful was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose political organization, Advancing America's Freedom, released a misleading ad ("Four Pinocchios," or a "whopper," according to the Washington Post) bashing Biden.

The ad, which focuses in part on the Keystone pipeline, is called "Horrific Decisions." But the real horrific decision is the one Pence and nearly every GOP lawmaker made in protecting former President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial over trying to leverage military aid to Ukraine for an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter.

It's not just Republicans who have disappointed. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Fifth District Democrat, was one of only two from her party to vote against the ban on Russian oil. Among her justifications, according to a statement, was "putting the specifics into statute with no sunset and no conditions for lifting the ban creates a dangerous scenario, one in which we are taking today's policy question and making it tomorrow's political question."

Policy is by its nature political. And setting a sunset on the ban will only encourage Putin to wait out Western resolve at a time when that rediscovered unity has clearly caught Putin off guard and raised the cost of his war.

A more rational analysis came from Second District Democrat Angie Craig, who told the Star Tribune's Hunter Woodall that, "I also think that we have to remain energy independent, so if that means in the short term we have to increase our domestic production or encourage private companies to do that, then that's what we need to do. But at the end of the day, we've got to accelerate our transition to renewable energy."

Perhaps Prof. Marcus summed up the economics — and the ethos — best. "We're fighting a war," he said. "There has to be a certain amount of sacrifice. I think we have to be frank about that to people in the United States as to why this is happening. And also, that it isn't permanent."