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 U.S. 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.”
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