I have never hidden the fact that I have considered NATO’s war with Russia stupid, unnecessary and harmful to both sides from the very beginning. I have also written many times that if we are going to fight a war, we should fight it so that we win. And not so stupidly that we send hundreds of thousands of people to their needless deaths, impoverish ourselves, and lose anyway.
However, I have never expressed the slightest sympathy for the other side. Nor was there any reason for that sympathy. And I accepted the basic logic that whoever crosses the border first with his army can rightly be called the guilty party in a war.
But in the last week it’s been different. Western statesmen are taking steps that are highly likely to lead to a war with billions of dead. They are opposed by the Russian government, which is trying to avert that catastrophe. In such circumstances, any sensible person must keep their fingers crossed for Putin to pull it off.
Meanwhile, the Western official narrative is: Putin is to blame. If he had decided to surrender unconditionally, then we would have stopped shooting at Russia. Well, maybe we would stop, we offer no guarantees. But it is the narrative of a criminal who blames his victim.
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what an independent sociologist somewhere in the Czech Republic.