Is Russia Really The Baddie?

[Lauren Johnson]

It is astonishing to me there are still liberals, i.e. the people I know in my community, who still think Russia started the war out of the blue under the orders of the knuckle dragging Slav, Putin.  "He is threatening all of Europe."  etc.  There's no talking with them about alternative models.  The Ukraine project is a decades long initiative in different forms always in the context of Drang nach Osten, dismantling Russia without a nuclear war.  I used to think Putin was a Russian patriot fighting The Empire.  For me, that dog stopped hunting some a few months ago.  The Ukraine war is a function of a managed dialectic.  Where does the agency for this conflict reside?  Someplace deeper and darker, in the halls of Mordor.