when right-wing neo-con stooges like thomas friedman argue that ukraine is a democracy and russia isn't, are they doing so out of ignorance or dishonesty?
ukraine and russia both had elections scheduled for 2024. russia carried out it's elections. ukraine did not. putin was recently reelected. zelensky refuses to hold elections.
you can criticize the russians over state repression, and i won't argue with you. it's true. but ukraine has exactly the same political system and exactly the same culture and the repression in ukraine is equivalent or worse.
so, which is it?
is friedman ignorant about the political realities in ukraine or is he aware of them and being dishonest when he calls ukraine democratic?
maybe you support ukraine for other reasons. russophobia - a fear of russian expansion - is a real thing. maybe you're still fighting the last war, against the communists. maybe you're racist against russians. the mainstream press has done everything but explicitly call them non-europoid mongoloids in their racist attacks on russia (and has come pretty close to being explicit about it), which forms one of the arguments russia has presented for why it's doing this - there is a latent nazism barely concealed under the surface of western culture that threatens russia directly. you see this latent nazism in the recent liberal support for "palestine", as well.
but the idea of ukraine protecting democracy is farcical. it is specious. it is counter-factual and irrational. it is not upheld but firmly torn down by the most cursory analysis. it requires immense ignorance or immense dishonesty to write an article like this, and i just don't know what the truth is.