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Cutting ties with artists and writers risks compounding the dehumanization it means to protest.

“Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.” So states the PEN Charter, a manifesto that guides an international movement of authors dedicated to defending the freedom to write. The Charter was adopted in 1948, alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a dawning moment for the liberal international system. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine has not only rattled that system but also challenged the position of arts and literature as an international common denominator. Cultural organizations have felt impelled not simply to proclaim solidarity with Ukraine but also to draw up bridges, curtailing engagement with Russian artists.

Cultural outlets owe patrons, partners and audiences a conscientious response to international violence, mindful of how their decisions can shape perceptions, inflame passions and play into political agendas. The impulse to stigmatize and disavow all things Russian is an understandable reaction to brazen aggression; it is a gesture of solidarity with besieged counterparts. But a wholesale boycott spanning music, theater, art, films and books—and their creators—risks compounding the authoritarianism and dehumanization that it intends to protest.

Making elites suffer disgrace and deprivation, the theory goes, will reshape leaders’ incentives.

Conceptually, the case for cultural boycott derives from the arguments for sanctioning wrongdoers. Imposed cultural isolation aims to raise the cost of violent transgression so that it burdens daily life. Making elites suffer disgrace and deprivation, the theory goes, will reshape leaders’ incentives. Though scholars debate its influence, the most oft-cited example is the cultural boycott of South Africa, which is said to have led some whites to begin to turn on apartheid.

But cultural ostracism lacks the hard bite of financial sanctions or airspace restrictions. No one believes that cancelling Russian soprano Anna Netrebko’s appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, delaying the Russian release of “The Batman,” or withholding American books from Russian shelves will ward Mr. Putin off Kyiv. Amid images of fleeing children shot dead, cultural boycott is less an act of coercion than of conscience. Pangs over Ukraine’s fate fuel a primal urge to stand with its defenders.

Some Ukrainian filmmakers and literary organizations have called for comprehensive boycotts of Russian films and books as cultural propaganda, and the withholding of Western creative works from Russia. As much as we might empathize with such maximalist demands, they fail to take full account of the ethical and practical complexities of the case. As with recent demands to defund the police or abolish ICE amid our domestic upheavals, such calls should be heard not as literal policy prescriptions but as cries from the heart that demand heedful response.

We must not engage blithely with Russian culture in wartime, but that does not mean we shouldn’t engage at all. The insistence that all art is political, or politically uniform, is as false as the notion that art can be fully severed from politics. Artistic freedom implies the ability to defy dogma, break precedent and challenge authority. To ascribe Mr. Putin’s nihilist brutality to every Russian filmmaker, diva or author denies the essence of art, and of human agency itself. Freedom of thought is the chance to voice your own ideas. It is also a shield against having the opinions of others imputed to you against your will.

Authoritarians aspire to turn artists and intellectuals into tools of the state. For the world to conflate art and agitprop plays into Mr. Putin’s hands. Meanwhile, the growing number of Russian conductors, filmmakers and authors protesting the war speak to the futility of his attempts to enforce cultural submission. Opera singer Vadim Cheldiyev has twice been jailed for anti-Putin protests. Historian Yuri Dmitriev is serving 15 years in prison on trumped-up charges for his exposés of Stalinist mass graves. In just the last few days, Thomas Sanderling, who was born in Novosibirsk, stepped down as the head of the city’s vaunted philharmonic orchestra to protest the invasion. Vasily Petrenko, the State Academic Symphony Orchestra’s artistic director, said he would not perform in his home country “until peace has been restored.”

For cultural institutions to tar all Russians with Mr. Putin’s crimes also risks feeding xenophobia in the West. The premise of guilt-by-association is already fueling instances of harassment and intimidation against Russian-speakers and owners of Russian-themed restaurants in the U.S. and Europe.

There is no blueprint for conscientious cultural engagement with nationals of an aggressor state. Official entities—state theaters, for example—are most easily disavowed as tools of soft state power. It is difficult to imagine a concert hall presenting conductor Valery Gergiev, the director of Moscow’s Mariinsky Theatre, without seeming to endorse his unabashed alliance with Mr. Putin. Beyond that it gets more complicated. The Kremlin is the primary underwriter of its nation’s culture. (Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s dissident novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev.) Asking artists to disavow Mr. Putin’s war in order to carry on creatively can imperil their safety.

International arts exchanges are not just forms of entertainment or edification but a birthright of global citizenship. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights enshrines the right to “receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” If curators or booksellers adopt strict ideological or national litmus tests, they forfeit the power to surprise, challenge and change us.

Literature—and especially works in translation—can enable readers to inhabit the worlds of their sworn geopolitical foes, unlocking empathy as an antidote to contempt. Cultural dialogues with independent-minded Russians are essential to illuminating the current crisis and conjuring paths past it.

Last week, Vancouver’s Recital Society canceled an August performance by 20-year-old Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev for fear of “demonstrations outside or hecklers inside.” In doing so, they surrendered to the heckler’s veto, allowing groups of unruly objectors to dictate what audiences may see and hear. That an apolitical Russian piano prodigy was banned from a concert six months hence also raises troubling questions of how long these prohibitions will endure and what it will take to lift them.

The South Africa boycott illustrates the attendant complexities. When U.S. municipalities refused to do business with publishers active in South Africa, Black South African students lost access to the latest medical textbooks. The Wall Street Journal was banned from libraries in Houston for having a correspondent covering South Africa. Paul Simon’s 1986 album “Graceland,” which was partly recorded in South Africa, was reviled by boycott organizers yet embraced by many of the country’s most eminent Black musicians. The struggle against apartheid is testament to an ethic of informed and purposeful cross-cultural dealings, not ironclad prohibitions.

Arts institutions can best help Ukrainians by positioning themselves not as a bulwark against Russian culture but as a fortification of Ukraine’s. By aiding and hosting Ukrainian artists, translating works and preserving treasures, Western institutions can support Ukraine’s fight for survival. In addressing the area once known as the Soviet Union, Western interpreters should reject the Kremlin’s self-serving lens and widen the aperture to encompass Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other nations with distinct histories and aspirations.

The Russian onslaught against Ukraine has as its target the liberal international order, the premise of self-government and the universal yearning for freedom. To fight back, cultural institutions should rebuke not just the Kremlin’s invasion but Mr. Putin’s determination to wage a mortal clash of civilizations, peoples and ideas.