Ranging from the outright abettors to the lukewarm appeasers, people in the West promote favorable to Russia narratives for any one—but usually a combination—of the four following reasons…
1️⃣ Genuine concern over the prospect of global war and recession, combined with gross ignorance of history and geopolitics
Somehow, despite even Putin himself openly and vocally touting his true intentions, they buy into the belief that Russia fights for the sake of Crimea, Donbas, Novorossiya, and Russian security.
They fail or refuse to recognize that the Russian regime—and to a great extent, the Russian “soul”—are principally shaped by centuries of chauvinistic imperialism and visceral anti-Westernism.
They do not heed the words of top-ranking Russian officials and influential pundits who blatantly campaign for extermination of the West and world-domination.
They do not understand that any kind of armistice is for Russia but a break to recover and prepare for the next strike; that even a complete withdrawal from Ukraine is a moderate outcome, and the only real, definite solution is Russia’s dissolution and denuclearization.
Some do understand all that, but see a ceasefire as a way to buy time, hoping for the best but essentially sacrificing the future for the present.
However, they still fail to comprehend the immediate, catastrophic implications that even the most modest form of Russian victory will entail for the wider world order (from Taiwan and Korea to Brussels and Washington).
2️⃣ Fundamental alignment with one or more aspects of Putin’s tradition-upholding mission.
They sympathize with Russia because they perceive it as the bastion of one or more traditions about which they feel strongly. In order of primitiveness of tradition, they include:
Patriarchists, the most atavistic of traditionalists, clinging fanatically to animalistic instincts they call family values. They are misogynists, homophobes, sadists, and too macho (often short with small dicks). By extrapolation, they are fond of state authoritarianism.
Christians, from the Vatican to the rural American South, they agonize over saving a two-millennia-old tradition and its mythological ethics. For them, West=Atheism=Satanism.
Nationalists, they defend Nation-States that are a few centuries old, wrongly assuming they existed since forever. They feel threatened by globalization and immigration in particular. They often substitute the word “racist” for “patriot”. They admire Russian nationalism.
Communists, they adhere to extreme, cultist partisanship for a utopian 19th-century political ideology hijacked by 20th-century Soviet propaganda. Because the “triptych” of West-NATO-Capitalism denotes for them everything that’s evil, they see Putin as a proletarian hero.
3️⃣ Money
Some are people with financial stakes in the Russian economy, particularly in the petrochemical sector, who in any way profit in collusion with the Russian kleptocracy.
Others are the Kremlin’s salaried propagandists. They aren’t trolls (trolls troll for free). They have established, sizable audiences. They include depraved, populist quasi-journalists and sleazy, often old and broke, showbiz celebrities.
4️⃣ Blackmail
They commonly are high-profile politicians, businessmen, and other people whose livelihoods depend on status and public opinion.
They have in the past carried out dodgy dealings with Russia, of which the FSB holds incriminating evidence. That the latter has on them damning material of a personal nature (like videotaped intimacy with hookers in some Moscow hotel room) is also conceivable.
