I don't play golf. I'm a basketball player and regularly shoot the lights out of guys half a century younger than me.

Your hyperventilating about Ukraine as a Nazi country and incoherent Whataboutist wanderings from Time magazine to Babi Yar will remind everyone who reads your post of Giuliani's hair dye meltdown after the 2020 election. That you have 7 followers, less than 1/100 the number I have, is the measure of the difference between our levels of scholarly integrity and competence. Prigozhin is recruiting for PMC Wagner and the Internet Research Agency. Time for a career change?

Language policy in Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine. If I were an English speaker in Quebec, I'd prefer this law to Quebec's. But you decide after reading the law.

On the place of the OUN fascist Bandera in Ukrainian politics, some facts from a pre-war post by a Ukrainian-American, Taras Masnyj:

U.S. citizen, U.S. military veteran, software engineer. Updated Jan 20

Volodymyr Zelensky wants to project and probably really has a sympathetic attitude towards all Ukrainians (and Russians). He acknowledges Stepan Bandera’s historical importance to Ukraine and supports the idea of Ukraine (or any other country) having national heroes. In that sense he does support Bandera. What is more important are the political implications of this type of support.

Does Zelensky supports any of Bandera’s policical ideas or the ideas of many political parties that are in one way or another associated with Bandera? We don’t know for sure but the answer is that he probably does not. Ukrainian Nationalistic political views are too extreme for him to support. He may not want to openly state this because that would weaken the political value of the broad appeal his sympathetic persona has.

P.S.: A quick look at his campaign staff suggests that politically he does not support Stepan Bandera or any of the Ukrainian Nationalist organizations. You will immediately notice that most the staff have Russian surnames and most come from eastern or central Ukraine. Several of them also worked for Yanukovych (Ze! Team: Meet architects of presidential hopeful Zelensky's 2019 insurgent race).

All of the staff seem to have impressive credentials. It is hard to believe such an impressive group of people would support a candidate that was being controlled by Ukrainian nationalists. One staff member who is the exception is the young Svatoslay Yurash. He is a Ukrainian nationalist but is also a legitimate journalist with plenty of journalistic connections. Obviously the staff knew who Yurash is but they continued to work together. If they believed he was a political threat or that he could “control” Zelensky they would have insisted that Zelensky fire him or they themselves have quit working for the campaign."

"things are not going well in Bakhmut": Listen to my former colleague and retired British army colonel, Glen Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR69vUIQJAc

But you're far from alone in being surprised by Ukraine, as is made clear here by this MSNBC report by Mehdi Hassan, hardly a cheerleader for the American national security state:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO24ywwALbU

Just so you know the reality you're arguing with.

In denying the Bucha, Izyum and Irpin mass graves and that the bombing of the Mariupol theater filled with children were Russian war crimes turns you into a Russian BOT in human form.

Thanks for the useful reality-departing raw material

for future articles.