In the last few hours I have been reading social media messages in which the common denominator was the word \"Russophobia\".<\/p>\n
The vast majority of these messages are from authors on the far-left or the far-right. We've reached a point where it's difficult to distinguish between them, frankly. Both extremes have joined the strategy of portraying Russia as a victim while it continues its war of aggression against Ukraine<\/strong>, a war initiated by dictator Vladimir Putin in 2014 by sending Russian soldiers to invade the Ukrainian region of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and which on February 24, 2022, escalated into a full-scale invasion.<\/strong><\/p>\n For decades, the far-left has been clamoring against \"imperialism,\"<\/strong> but always alluding to the United States and NATO. When Putin commits a clear act of imperialism, such as invading a neighboring country<\/strong>, using nationalist and pseudo-historical arguments to justify a right to attack an independent nation and massacre its civilian population, then the far-left falls silent or even supports Putin's imperialism.<\/strong><\/p>\n Similarly, the far-right insists heavily on defending national sovereignty and patriotism<\/strong> against mass immigration, attempts to transform the European Union into a megastate, and \"globalism.\" But when Russia invades an independent country and Ukrainians defend their homeland<\/strong>, displaying courage and patriotism worthy of admiration by any decent person, then a large part of the far-right sides with the invader<\/strong>, who this time does not come in dinghies or starving, but with tanks, fighter jets, missiles and suicide drones.<\/p>\n To make this display of cynicism and hypocrisy seem less obvious<\/strong>, to make their incoherence less exposed to the public eye and to make it seem as if they continue to support their old ideals, the extreme left and the extreme right try to victimize the aggressor by denouncing that there is \"Russophobia\"<\/strong>, an argument as shameless as criticizing the Allies in World War II on the grounds that they were fostering Germanophobia.<\/p>\n Of course, to portray the aggressor as a victim, the first step is to conceal their crimes.<\/strong> Massacres like those in Bucha and Izyum are attributed by extremists on both sides to the Ukrainians who suffered them, without offering any evidence to contradict the abundant proof of Russian authorship of these crimes. The very word \"invasion\" is systematically omitted to make it seem as if we are facing a war in which we don't know who attacked whom<\/strong>, as Viktor Orb\u00e1n cynically claimed in December<\/a>, pretending he hadn't heard anything about what had happened.<\/p>\n Paradoxically, the same extremists who believe that everyone else is being manipulated<\/strong>, who think that other citizens don't support them because they are victims of a vast and sophisticated system designed to deceive them, are trying to make us believe that the right side of history is Putin's dictatorship<\/strong>, a mafia-like regime in which those who oppose the power are imprisoned or killed; a terrorist regime that murders civilians with their hands tied behind their backs, as we saw in the bodies found in Bucha and Izyum after the withdrawal of Russian troops; a regime allied with dictatorships like Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela<\/strong>, whose tyrants share Putin's same phobia of freedom and democracy.<\/p>\n My favorite composer is the Russian Modest Mussorgsky, and I have long admired Russian intellectuals<\/strong> who have had to flee their country because of Putin's dictatorship. I have nothing against the Russian people, who are the primary victims of an oppressive regime that is sending the young people of that country to die as cannon fodder in a purely criminal invasion. What I am very clear about is that Russia, under Putin's rule, has become a threat to peace in Europe<\/strong>, in the same way that Germany was in the last century under Hitler's dictatorship, something that does not prevent me from admiring German heroes like Sophie Scholl and her comrades in the White Rose<\/strong>, who opposed that criminal regime and were executed by it. And what I am also very clear about is that victimizing the aggressor is a despicable way of justifying their crimes and encouraging further aggression<\/strong>, which is exactly what the far-left and far-right Putinists are currently doing.<\/p>\n ---<\/p>\n Photo:\u00a0Gavriil Grigorov \/ Sputnik.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the last few hours I have been reading social media messages in which the common denominator was the word \u00abRussophobia\u00bb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10863],"tags":[10497,10873,10731,16153,26718,15307,7887],"class_list":["post-64478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflexions","tag-far-left","tag-far-right","tag-russia","tag-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-of-2022","tag-russophobia","tag-ukraine","tag-vladimir-putin"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-12 00:35:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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