THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

[S]ix months into this brutal war, there are still plenty of Western intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and activists willfully ignoring what Russia itself is telling them again and again, loud and clear. As a Russian journalist now in exile, I find this willful ignorance of my country deeply disturbing. Some of these pundits insist that there is a "peaceful" solution--which usually translates to stopping weapons deliveries to Ukraine and leaving the country to Russian leader Vladimir Putin to pick apart--or that the conflict is about the Kremlin's "interests" or "security concerns." All the while, the evidence of Russia's actual goals and war crimes in Ukraine has become ever more overwhelming.

A considerable part of this evidence comes from Russia's own propaganda sources, including TASS news agency photographers in occupied areas where foreigners and Russian independent media are not allowed. A host of Russian state media outlets have been meticulously documenting their military's atrocities, with the footage presented to Russians and the world as an achievement and underlined with an incessant stream of genocidal rhetoric. One has to be actively and systematically avoiding reality to claim that the invasion is anything other than a horrific crime bordering on genocide--and all of it committed by choice. The war will end when Putin chooses to end it--or is forced to do so. The alternative is the destruction of Ukraine, which Putin and countless Russian public figures have unequivocally said is not a real country and doesn't deserve to exist.

Still, some Western advocates of appeasement will offer perfunctory condemnations before then spending many times more column inches on diverting the blame from Putin to the United States, the West, NATO, or all of the above. With that kind of argument, they would have enthusiastic allies in the Kremlin. On Russian airwaves, the story goes that it was the Ukrainians who forced the invasion on Russia by supposedly preparing to annihilate Ukraine's Russian-speaking minority. In psychology, this is called projection.

If, like the political scientist John Mearsheimer, your arguments are being used by Russian state television to prop up the regime's ridiculous claims that Kyiv and Washington are to blame for this war, you should probably reconsider the intellectual journey that led you to this point. If, like many of the Western leftists obsessed with the NATO war cause theory, you reject imperialism and colonialism as a matter of principle (rather than only its U.S. or British versions), you couldn't have missed the Kremlin's detailed public plans for dismantling Ukraine's sovereignty, Russia's plundering of faraway lands like Sudan to fund a war of conquest and annihilation, and the Kremlin's use of ethnic minorities as cannon fodder for the war.

If you think Ukraine has a problem with a nationalist far right, then you might have noticed the unapologetic Hitler worshippers in the ranks of the Russian forces. If, like the British Labour Party's Jeremy Corbyn, you promote peace through diplomacy--appeasement-speak for stopping military aid to Ukraine and giving Putin what he wants--you should be aware by now of the realities in the Russian-occupied areas and ask yourself if this is really the fate you are willing to condemn millions of Ukrainians to. You might take it as a sign that you're on the wrong side of history--and just about anyone's understanding of ethics, including the right to self-defense--when you have to say out loud that you're not a Putin puppet.

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