Over the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the latter has received an outpouring of support from Western nations. Many in the (mostly terminally online) contrarian class, those individuals who are either openly pro-Russia or are anti-anti-Russia have responded to this newfound support for Ukraine in two ways. They have either derided Ukraine as a woke Western satellite led by equally woke puppet comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, or peculiarly, have made the opposite argument: Ukraine is plagued by neo-Nazis. Both dramatically misunderstand the situation, in terms of both how woke Ukraine truly is and why Ukraine is receiving support.
The first notion, that Ukraine is a woke paradise, is easily dispelled by actually looking at the country’s politics. Fewer than just two years ago, Zelensky was being critiqued by Western organizations for closing Ukraine’s Human Rights Directorate, which was opened in 2016 to much Western fanfare. Members of Servant of the People, the ruling political party, have frequently pushed anti-LGBT laws (though most have failed to become enacted). And in 2020, over 300 MPs — a majority of the Ukrainian parliament — joined a parliamentary group with the goals of “protect[ing] the eternal values of Ukrainian society and [counteracting] attempts to destroy fundamental natural law in the name of political fashion” and popularizing “a wide range of world conservative” intellectual Ukrainian thought. Not exactly a Clinton Foundation mission statement.
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