Thinking about…

The Russian lies told for foreigners return to that basic premise of non-existence. Ukrainians want to be Russians — because they do not exist. The Ukrainian government is illegitimate — because there is no Ukrainian nation that could have elected it. We will call the Ukrainian government or Ukrainians “Nazis” — not because that has any basis in reality, but because that would justify eliminating them. We will claim that Ukraine is an element of a conspiracy — if it is real, Ukraine is not.

The claim that somehow Russia had to invade Ukraine because of NATO also comes down to the notion that Ukraine does not exist. The story starts from the premise that only NATO has agency, that only NATO can act. Russia is therefore blameless in whatever it does, and Ukraine is simply a pawn. In this telling, the problem is that NATO was going to endlessly “enlarge” or “expand.” But that is not what happened. NATO was not an issue in Ukrainian politics before 2014. Ukraine could not have joined NATO back them because of military agreements with Russia that made this impossible. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine anyway. Then Ukrainians, sensibly enough, decided that joining NATO might be a good idea.