I read that first article on February 26 that erroneously called the war in Ukraine a "manufactured distraction." What you call "punishment" is really accountability for ahistorical ignorant journalistic malpractice. You have repeatedly:
1. Recommended Ukraine surrender to an openly exterminationist Russia rather than fight to exist, which = acceptance of the Russian imperial view of Ukraine's existence as a contingent, temporary aberration. How is this not genocide apologia? How is not equivalent to recommending that the Chinese of Nanjing in 1937 and the Jews of Warsaw in April 1943 surrender to their murderers?
2. Expressed Trump-like anti-intellectual contempt for those with deep expertise in Russian and Ukrainian history (Tim Snyder, Anne Applebaum, my American, British and Ukrainian veteran friends) while accepting the faux expertise of those who erroneously forecasted that Ukraine would fall in 3-4 days (Jacques Baud, Mark Milley).
3. Cited the Swiss Russian useful idiot Jacques Baud who erroneously and dishonestly blamed Ukraine for provoking the war, which is like blaming the rape victim for dressing provocatively in a short sovereignty skirt and flirting with the richer, stronger guy across town.
4. Ignored the truth and reparations half of the truth and reconciliation process that took place in South Africa, Chile and France/Germany.
5. Branded Ukrainian self-defense as escalation, based on the illusion that Russia ever pretended anything less than regime change and complete conquest.
6. Never defined what support for Ukraine did not fit your definition of "escalation", which means you view ALL western support for Ukraine as escalation. The only possible conclusion is that you just wish that the Ukrainians' stubborn insistence on existing would just go away so you could feel safe in your isolationist sheltered North America, like Lindbergh and Father Coughlin of 1940 on the right and the "don't fight the imperialist war" CPUSA before June 22, 1941.
7. Written that there was no moral difference between the murderers of Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and Izyum and their victims.
8. Let Putin push your nuclear fear button to the point of openly advocating the sacrifice of 44m Ukrainians so you can feel perfectly safe. Even Faust sold his soul in a better deal than the one you're ready to sign with Putin.
All this explains why you fit perfectly into KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's definition of "useful idiot". With an incompetent, corrupt, hypercentralized military and shambolic mobilization of cannon fodder producing a mass exodus of educated talent from Russia 2.5x as big as the mobilization, Putin's only hope for undermining western support for Ukraine is western useful idiots like you, Trump, tiki-torched Tucker, JD Vance, Rand Paul, MTG, Gaetz, Boebert, Nick Fuentes' AFPAC Putin! Putin! Putin! chanters, CodePink, Gosar, Gabbard and Greenwald. You are defined by the policy preferences of the company you keep.
"All Zelenskiy had to do was sign a peace agreement" would have yielded a Man In the High Castle alternate reality "peace" of surrender to Russia's genocidal war you've repeatedly recommended to Ukraine. Here's that alternate reality from Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gulag:
"Nothing about this (Zelenskiy's) trip—not the applause, not the flag, not the speech—was inevitable. Zelensky’s very survival was not inevitable. Ukraine’s continued existence as a sovereign state was not inevitable either. Back in February, many considered these things to be improbable.
On the eve of the invasion, some American experts advised against offering military aid to Ukraine, on the grounds that the war was going to be over too quickly. Other Americans repeated Russian propaganda, questioning whether Ukraine deserved to exist or whether it deserved to be defended. Some American politicians echoed those views and indeed continue to do so. What if they had prevailed? What if a different president had been in the White House? What if a different president had been elected in Ukraine? Let’s imagine, just for a moment, a world without Ukrainian courage, or American and European weapons, or the unity and support of democracies around the world.
Had the Russian plan been carried out as it was written, Kyiv would have been conquered in just a few days. Zelensky, his wife, and his children would have been murdered by one of the hit squads that roamed the capital city. The Ukrainian state would have been taken over by the collaborators who had already chosen their Kyiv apartments. Then, city by city, region by region, the Russian army would have fought the remnants of the Ukrainian army until it finally conquered the entire country. Originally, the Russian general staff imagined that this victory would require six weeks.
Had all of that happened as planned, Ukraine would now be pockmarked with the concentration camps, torture chambers, and makeshift prisons that have been discovered in Bucha, Izyum, Kherson, and all the other territories temporarily occupied by Russia and liberated by the Ukrainian army. A generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, politicians, journalists, and civic leaders would already be buried in mass graves. Ukrainian books would have been removed from schools and libraries. The Ukrainian language would have been suppressed in all public spaces. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian children would have been kidnapped and transported to Russia or trafficked farther around the world.
Russian soldiers, strengthened by their stunning victory, would already be on the borders of Poland, setting up new command posts, digging new trenches. NATO would be in chaos; the entire alliance would be forced to spend billions to prepare for the inevitable invasion of Warsaw, Vilnius, or Berlin. Millions of Ukrainian refugees would be living in camps all across Europe, with no prospect of ever returning home; the tide of sympathy that originally greeted them would have ebbed long ago; the money would be running out, the backlash under way. The Moldovan economy would have collapsed entirely; a pro-Russian government in Moldova would perhaps already be planning to incorporate that country into the emerging Russian-Belarusian-Ukrainian federation that one Russian propagandist hailed, too early, on February 26.
On the other side of the world, Chinese plans to invade Taiwan would be well under way, because Beijing would assume that an America unwilling to defend a European ally, and now totally bogged down in a long-term battle against an emboldened Russia, would never go out of its way to help an island in the Pacific. The Iranian mullahs, equally cheered by Russia’s success and Ukraine’s defeat, would have boldly announced that they had finally acquired nuclear weapons. From Venezuela to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, dictatorships around the world would have tightened their regimes and stepped up the persecution of their opponents, now certain that the old rules—the conventions on human rights and genocide, the laws of war, the taboo against changing borders by force—no longer applied. From Washington to London, from Tokyo to Canberra, the democratic world would be grimly facing up to its obsolescence.
But none of this happened. Because Zelensky stayed in Kyiv, declaring that he needed “ammunition, not a ride”; because Ukrainian soldiers repulsed the first Russian attack on their capital; because Ukrainian society pulled together to support its army; because Ukrainians at all levels were creative in their use of limited resources; because Ukrainian civilians were, and are, willing to endure terrible hardship; because of all of that, we are not living in that ugly, alternate reality."
You owe not living in this Man In the High Castle alternate reality to the courage, sacrifice and resilience of the Ukrainians of the Maidan Revolution of Dignity, those buried in the now demolished to hide the war crime theater in Mariupol, the partisan assassins of Russian Quislings in Kherson, my student Anna Bondarenko who founded the Ukraine Volunteer Service, and the Ukrainian military's and territorial defense forces' disruptive startup war of a thousand bee stings.
Until now you've repaid this debt to Ukraine with appeasing betrayal identical to the appeasing non-interventionists of the Spanish Civil War. As with high interest credit card debt, you can't become solvent by borrowing more.
