Another Putin Parrot peddling Russophilic disinformation. Here's how:
1. "They have a problem with fascism": The far right in Ukraine got 2.19% of the vote in 2019 while electing a Jew president with 73%. If you'd told this to my paternal grandparents from Rivne, Vinnytsia and Chmelnik they would have replied to this political surrealism with, "what are ya, meshuggah?"
Meanwhile, Marine LePen got 45% in France, Trump 46% in 2020, Musso-mini Giorgia Meloni got elected PM in Italy, Viktor Orban got re-elected in Hungary, Erdgogan in Turkiye. The fascism problem is borderless and far worse elsewhere.
2. "What exactly are we defending in Ukraine again?" --The UN Charter which says conquest by force is against international law.
3. BoJo and Zelenskiy: If BoJo couldn't even manage Partygate, do you believe he could turn Zelenskiy into a pawn?
4. "co-dependency": Again, the narcissistic hubris of this customer service rep who thinks his de-escalation skill set translates into reconciling geopolitical opposites. Russia's Ukraine erasure project predates the American empire and NATO by three centuries. Seeing as a therapy problem the conflict between a mafia with a flag kleptocracy inspired by its history of top-down Golden Horde tributary governance vs Ukraine's long history of contractual governance inherited from the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth is ahistorical idiocy.
5. Russia is an empire-aholic and only defeat can free its people: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-defeat-will-free-russias-people-from-their-empire-prison-d2d447fa90e6
6. "We shipped powerkegs to Russia's doorstep": I already blew up this fantasy elsewhere: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/time-to-blow-up-blame-nato-disinformation-4b3e93b69320
7. "Russia on a suicidal mission to restore its empire": If you say no, you haven't been listening to Vladimir Putin saying exactly that: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares-himself-to-peter-the-great-in-quest-to-take-back-russian-lands
Yes, Russian self-determination doesn't include the genocidal conquest of other peoples--Tatars, Dagestanis, Chechens, Buryats, Karelians, Ukrainians, etc.
8. "where is the international force with boots on the ground?"--The Ukrainians want only the tools, not the bodies from the West. Or have you not been listening?
9. "Surrender. When we surrender, we have to trust that things will work out."--Tell that to the Chinese of Nanjing in 1937-38, the Jews of Warsaw in April 1943, the Poles of Warsaw a year later. This appeaser reveals himself as such in asking Ukraine to consent to not existing so he won't wet his bed in fear of Russian nuclear blackmail. We tried appeasement from 1933-41. Never again.
https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
10. "a few tons of weapons...and a check"--Rheinmetall just upped its tank shell production from 450k to 600k/year.
This American-centric provincial is so remote from Europe that he thinks we still use paper checks. I haven't seen a paper check in Italy, Portugal or Latvia in more than two decades. But we're not as primitive as those financial troglodytes in Colorado. Please, someone convince him to get a passport and take a plane to see how things work across the pond.
I just returned from a week in NJ and Philadelphia for a family wedding and found it backward, crumbling, inefficient, squalid, underinvested in public transport that was filthy and undermaintained, littered and potholed streets and sidewalks, luxury housing construction with homeless men on the same streets....
America is a crumbling empire, but the Russian and Chinese kleptocracies are far worse and will crumble long before it.
