Imagine time travel were possible and you could visit the Scott Dunn of the summer of 2022 who:
1. Wrote that Ukraine should surrender.
2. Forecast Russian victory in short order, as most Western military "experts" and Putin himself did.
3. Blamed the US and NATO for the war.
4. Cited the Bucha and Irpin war crime denier Jacques Baud as a credible source and said there was no moral difference between the two sides.
....
and you could tell him about these events which have already happened. Would this knowledge change his mind?
1. Russia's most successful commander and his troops mutiny and march on Rostov and Moscow, shooting down Russian helicopters and an aerial command center, killing 13 aviators. Russia's most competent generals, Surovikin, Popov, Seliverstov, Teplinsky all removed for telling the truth about their superiors' incompetence and corruption.
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/more-chaos-theory-russian-style-12f47b86658b
2. Within two months said mercenary warlord is publicly executed by Tsar Putin.
3. The Kremlin is drone-bombed by Ukraine.
4. The Moscow City financial center and Moscow's elite suburbs were repeatedly drone-bombed.
5. Ukraine destroyed a $250m S-400 aerial defense system in Crimea (yesterday) with a Ukrainian-mfd cruise missile.
6. The Kerch Strait bridge was twice knocked out of action while Russians in swimsuits on the beach watched mushroom clouds coming from Russian air bases.
7. Russian navy flagship Moskva sunk. The entire Russian navy confined to Novorossisk in fear of Ukrainian seaborne drones, which also hit Russian tankers and warships.
8. 6000km2 of the region east of Kharkiv retaken in a surprise Ukrainian blitzkrieg that turns Russia into Ukraine's biggest arms supplier and into the biggest verified creator of mass civilian graves since the Yugoslav wars of 1992-95.
9. Kherson liberated and the Russian near total looting of its art museum documented.
10. 1.5m of Russia's best and brightest fleeing repression and mobilization in Russia.
11. Ukrainian troops on the heights and within artillery range above Tokmak and its rail link to Crimea and through Russia's first defensive line.
12. The weak and decadent West sees Germany moving from supplying 5000 helmets to Leopard tanks and Marders, British Storm Shadows that regularly hit air bases in Crimea.
13. Sweden and Finland in NATO.
14. ICC-indicted war criminal Putin attending the BRICS summit by video link.
15. The sanctions don't work RBL dropping from 60 to 98/$ and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, slated to take over Wagner's Africa mines, says Russia will exhaust its foreign reserves and sovereign wealth fund by year-end 2023.
Imagine you could go back in time and tell the Scott Dunn of June 2022 all this. Would have change his mind. Since the answer is obviously no, here's the explanation:
KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov defined western defenders of the USSR as "useful idiots". The link above tells you in what political shades of useful idiocy they come in. They merely inhabit different regions of Russified Whataboutistan that absolve Russia of waging a genocidal ALL of its political, media and military elite have openly proclaimed it to be. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=russian+media+monitor
https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
How Putin fooled the western left, from Russian-British philosopher Vlad Vexler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=017WGzJ5fHA&t=2s
"would Russia be peaceful too?"--Since Russia's Ukraine erasure project predates the American empire by nearly three centuries, the answer is a single word: NO.
