As the Trump administration pauses military aid to Ukraine and western liberals continue their shrieking meltdown over Trump hurting Saint Zelensky’s feelings, it’s probably worth reminding everyone that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was indisputably provoked by western aggressions. That’s why so many western experts and analysts spent years warning ahead of time that western aggressions were going to provoke an invasion of Ukraine.

Now, some may hear this and say “Okay but Russia still shouldn’t have invaded even though our western leaders were aggressively provoking them to.” But before you do that it might be a good idea to look inside yourself and ask where that impulse is arising from. Why are you so eager to skip past the part where you criticize your own rulers for their role in starting this war and focus solely on criticizing the leader of an eastern government who has no power over you? What is it inside of you that’s flailing all over the place trying to avoid any forceful scrutiny of the reckless warmongering of your own government and its allies?

The last time a foreign rival placed a credible military threat near the border of the United States, the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended (if you want to know just how close we came to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look up the name Vasili Arkhipov). Western liberals have been conditioned to insist that Russia should have responded differently to the US empire amassing proxy forces on its border than the US would respond to the same kind of threat on its own borders. The frenetic mental contortions needed to justify this ridiculous double standard are only possible because the west is saturated in domestic propaganda manipulating the way they think about the world.