Don’t buy the fringe anti-Ukraine myth about the run-up to Russia’s invasion
NY Post
Aaron Maté, a leftist Canadian who writes for the fringe conspiracy-theory website Grayzone, has recently become a favorite source for the far-right fringe of the MAGA universe, the fringe that prefers to “Make America Guilty Again.”
Don’t buy it.
Maté just produced a long-read article on Ukraine for RealClearPolitics. Because of RCP’s credibility, his error-riddled “investigation” into the origins of the war in Ukraine is gaining a readership, even in congressional circles.
Indeed, Maté’s polemic is full of distortions.
His central claim: The Russia-Ukraine war is the spawn of intervention by the Obama-Biden administration, which supported and directed a coup in 2014 by Ukraine’s “far-right” — a claim that echoes the most persistent theme of Russia’s propaganda machine.
The truth: As anyone in Kyiv during those turbulent months (as I was) knows, the Maidan protests of 2013-2014 were led and directed by democratic, pro-European politicians and supported by the mass protests of hundreds of thousands of ordinary middle-class citizens from Kyiv and around the country.
“The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” is guaranteed right at the top of the First Amendment, but the folks in charge of The Washington Post see such action as profoundly sinister if the “wrong” people do it, or perhaps the paper’s problem is with association and communication for the wrong causes.