This article shows why one should definitely believe something once it’s officially denied.
You’re cheerleading for Russia if:
1. You mindlessly repeat the evidence-free story of Russian military omnipotence which has been debunked by Prigozhin, Girkin, many panicked Russian milbloggers and the drunken Russian commander who ordered his troops to fire on Wagner mercenaries. And ignore how the war is now entering Russian territory and the hundreds of intercepted calls of desperate Russian soldiers talking about how they're given no supplies, food and left abandoned by corrupt commanders stealing everything not nailed down. You're cheerleading for Russia in denying that the only offensive capability left in the Russian army is war crimes attacks on civilian apt blocks and infrastructure, most of which now don't get through, hypersonic Kinzhal missiles included.
2. You assume Russia will respect any agreement more than it did the 1994 Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nukes.
3. You believe Putin launched the war because of NATO expansion or Russian national security when he did so solely for regime preservation against the threat of the good example next door.
4. You pitch a compromise that would leave Russia in control of Sebastopol and a militarized and filtration prison camp filled Crimea, which would prevent Ukraine from ever being a viable state.
5. You repeatedly quote Bucha, Irpin, Izyum, Mariupol mass grave war crime deniers.
6. You advocated Ukrainian surrender in April of last year, which you wish your current readers would not see.
7. You write only about Ukrainian and western escalation and not Russian escalation with thousands of war crimes, including mass deportations of Ukrainian children, the torture rooms in occupied territories, and the systematic looting of Ukraine's art treasures that you'd like to unsee.
8. You ignore that Russia has not altered its escalation and war crimes one iota due to western restraint in slow-walking weapons supply.
9. You mindlessly repeat the geopolitics version of the efficient market hypothesis that if Russia were a threat we already would have contained it. Strip out fascism, Germany, Japan and the USSR and replace Russia within this phrase to see what nonsense it is.
10. You pitch Russian math when they've lost 3400 tanks and are pulling WWII and Korean War era T-34 and T-55 tanks while claiming to have destroyed the Ukrainian air force, HIMARS and other forces three times over.
11. You engage in the economic illiteracy that says a third world petro state mafia with a flag kleptocracy with a $1.5tn GDP can defeat a coalition with $70tn in GDP.
12. Pitch the mindless trope of Europe as old and tired when the EU Commission is led by people like mother of seven Ursula von der Leyen and Estonian PM Kallas who have more balls than you ever will.
13. PItch negotiating about Ukraine without Ukraine, as Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler about Czechoslovakia's fate.
14. View negotiation as the route to a frozen conflict (euphemistically called a ceasefire) that would leave Ukraine a failed state subject to the next round of Russian invasion.
15. Ignore that Russia’s genocidal Ukraine erasure project predates NATO’s existence by more than two centuries and ignore the tsunami of genocidal vitriol coming from Russian media and leadership documented at https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/ .
16. Ignore that Russia consistently loses wars (Crimea 1.0, vs Japan in 1905, WWI in 1914-18, Afghanistan 1979-89), when not allied with a more powerful and technologically advanced western power (with the Prussians against the Swedes in the Great Northern War, with the UK against Napoleon, when saved by Lendlease with the Anglo-Americans in 1941-45).
17. If you believe that Russia will stop if it's not stopped in Ukraine.
I could list 100 more...but it's 1 am in Jurmala.
