What you see on X about Ukraine, Russia likely wrong [View all]

By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion

Lately, I made a point of reading the posts I normally skip on X, formerly Twitter; the ones that parrot disinformation as if it were well-known fact. Some of these accounts have followings in the hundreds of thousands, including the likes of Elon Musk or the economist Jeffrey Sachs, so you may assume that much of what they write is true.

With President-elect Donald Trump expected to quickly try bringing an end to the war in Ukraine after taking office, I want to address the hoariest myth of all: It’s all the fault of an aggressive West.

According to this narrative, which has gained traction across the global South in particular, Russia is a fellow victim of western colonialism and was moved to invade Ukraine by two outrageous provocations: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s hostile eastward expansion and, in 2014, a CIA-engineered coup in Kyiv that threatened the nation’s ethnic Russian minority with “extermination.” This matters because, if true, all it would take to stop the bloodshed is for the West to close the door to NATO and stop sending Ukraine weapons. If not, those decisions would simply help the Kremlin achieve its goals of territorial conquest, and promise a widening radius for destabilization.

Myth: Russia is a victim of colonial western powers

When it comes to colonialism, Russia is as Western as they come. Its history has been one of relentless and remarkably successful imperial expansion, interspersed by brief interludes of military defeat and imperial collapse. That’s how the Soviet Union ended up covering a sixth of the planet’s landmass. It’s how Russia took an area the size of Egypt in the West’s “unequal treaties” with China (the British got Hong Kong).

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