The march of the west was sneaky, CIA, election fraud starting before 2014, but finally succeeding in 2014 and following.

The Ukraine military was killing its own citizens and destroying their property, militarily, even before 2014... and sometimes dipping into Russia to do it.

Pundits skeptical of or even hostile to Ukraine’s cause in its defensive war against Russia have different reasons, or rationalizations, for their views and hail from different points on the political spectrum. But there is one belief that unites nearly all of them: the conviction that Ukraine is not a democracy fighting for its survival but an American “Deep State” project, with a regime installed by a 2014 coup that was led by Ukrainian far-right extremists and backed or even engineered by the U.S. State Department. The corollary of this view is the belief that the pro-Kremlin enclaves in Eastern Ukraine, the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk—whose defense was the stated purpose of the Russian invasion—are genuine expressions of the will of the local populace which rejects the pro-Western, anti-Moscow regime in Kyiv.

This narrative is embraced by the progressive left (CodePink’s Medea Benjamin, the Nation’s Aaron Maté, etc.) and the populist right (the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, and many others) and gives both permission to disregard their ostensible values—anti-imperialism and liberation struggles for the left, commitment to national sovereignty for the right.

It has been echoed even by some people broadly sympathetic to the pro-freedom aspirations of the Maidan (Independence Square) protesters who rose against Kremlin-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 and early 2014.

The march of the west was sneaky, CIA, election fraud starting before 2014, but finally succeeding in 2014 and following.

The Ukraine military was killing its own citizens and destroying their property, militarily, even before 2014... and sometimes dipping into Russia to do it.

Pundits skeptical of or even hostile to Ukraine’s cause in its defensive war against Russia have different reasons, or rationalizations, for their views and hail from different points on the political spectrum. But there is one belief that unites nearly all of them: the conviction that Ukraine is not a democracy fighting for its survival but an American “Deep State” project, with a regime installed by a 2014 coup that was led by Ukrainian far-right extremists and backed or even engineered by the U.S. State Department. The corollary of this view is the belief that the pro-Kremlin enclaves in Eastern Ukraine, the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk—whose defense was the stated purpose of the Russian invasion—are genuine expressions of the will of the local populace which rejects the pro-Western, anti-Moscow regime in Kyiv.

This narrative is embraced by the progressive left (CodePink’s Medea Benjamin, the Nation’s Aaron Maté, etc.) and the populist right (the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, and many others) and gives both permission to disregard their ostensible values—anti-imperialism and liberation struggles for the left, commitment to national sovereignty for the right.

It has been echoed even by some people broadly sympathetic to the pro-freedom aspirations of the Maidan (Independence Square) protesters who rose against Kremlin-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 and early 2014.