Cathy Young writes:

Pundits skeptical of or even hostile to Ukraine’s cause in its defensive war against Russia have different reasons, or rationalizations, for their views and hail from different points on the political spectrum. But there is one belief that unites nearly all of them: the conviction that Ukraine is not a democracy fighting for its survival but an American “Deep State” project, with a regime installed by a 2014 coup that was led by Ukrainian far-right extremists and backed or even engineered by the U.S. State Department. The corollary of this view is the belief that the pro-Kremlin enclaves in Eastern Ukraine, the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk—whose defense was the stated purpose of the Russian invasion—are genuine expressions of the will of the local populace which rejects the pro-Western, anti-Moscow regime in Kyiv.

This narrative is embraced by the progressive left (CodePink’s Medea Benjamin, the Nation’s Aaron Maté, etc.) and the populist right (the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, and many others) and gives both permission to disregard their ostensible values—anti-imperialism and liberation struggles for the left, commitment to national sovereignty for the right.

It has been echoed even by some people broadly sympathetic to the pro-freedom aspirations of the Maidan (Independence Square) protesters who rose against Kremlin-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 and early 2014. Take, for instance, a piece by Branko Marcetic published in the left-wing magazine Jacobin this past February on the eve of the war and purporting to set the record straight on the “widely misunderstood” events of 2014 known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity. Marcetic acknowledges that the Yanukovych regime was not only corrupt but brutally authoritarian; while he believes that the United States exploited the Maidan uprising, he concedes that it’s an “overstatement” to say that the protests were “orchestrated” by Washington. Yet Marcetic concludes that the revolution was hijacked “to empower literal neo-Nazis” and enact the agenda of opportunistic Western backers, ultimately setting the stage for war with Russia.

Such accounts feature enough factual nuggets to lend them verisimilitude—notably, an infamous leaked 2014 phone call in which Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, were discussing the role of various opposition figures in Ukraine’s post-Maidan government. (That Nuland is currently the under secretary of state for political affairs—and the official who recently confirmed the existence of U.S.-assisted “biological research facilities” in Ukraine—just makes the conspiracy theories juicier.) But a closer look shows that, more often than not, this purportedly damning evidence is cherry-picked and snatched of context, while other key facts are omitted or glossed over. [Continue reading…]