Prepare for Peace
Brooks Agnew – I have bad news for the Pentagon and the military-industrialists. President Trump and Vice President Vance’s combative meeting with President Zelensky today was an important first step in preparing the American people for peace.
After three years of being lionized by European Union members (with exceptions such as Prime Minister Orbán of Hungary), Trump and Vance put Zelensky in a different light. Zelensky came off as arrogant, disrespectful (not wearing a suit in the White House and referring to the Vice President as “JD”) and ungrateful, and Vance mentioned two facts most of the American media have ignored:
♦ Zelensky interfered in our election by effectively campaigning for Harris in the swing state of Pennsylvania.
♦ The Ukrainian government has been forced to grab men off the street for conscription because its manpower problems are so bad.
Putting Zelensky in a more objective light was a necessary first step. The next step is to bring some objectivity to the subjects of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the origins of the Russia-Ukraine War.
This Is Not A Marvel Movie
The Ukrainians aren’t the good guys. The Russians aren’t cartoonishly evil. Vladimir Putin isn’t a movie villain. As long as people believe this propaganda, they will resist attempts to end the war. The next step is for the Trump administration, ideally the Vice President, to give Americans a more accurate explanation of how we got here. Glenn Greenwald did that recently in the X thread below.
Putin just sunk Keir Starmers battleship. This is what you get for being a bumbling idi*t. “Russian missiles sink cargo ship carrying UK weapons for Ukraine” Vladimir Putin unleashed a missile strike to ‘sink’ a cargo ship amid unconfirmed Russian claims it was carrying British weapons for use by Ukraine.
Two Iskander-M ballistic missiles hit the Panama-flagged container ship MSC LEVANTE F – reportedly Swiss-owned – soon after it arrived in Odesa on March 1, after making a stop in Turkey.
The Extent Of American Media Bias Against Russia
Judging from conversations on X, a lot of Americans who consume mainstream media seem unaware of its bias against Russia. This is true even on conservative cable stations, where, for example, they’ll refer to the Russia-Ukraine war as “Putin’s War Against Ukraine”.
This is misleading for the reason suggested by Greenwald’s last post above: any Russian leader would have reacted similarly in this situation. But it’s also a propaganda tactic.
We personify bad countries: Hitler invades Poland; Saddam invades Kuwait; Putin invades the Ukraine. By calling it “Putin’s war”, the media is suggesting that Hitler, Putin, and Saddam belong in the same category.
Do they? They were all autocrats to one extent or the other, but the similarities mostly end there.
Why Putin Isn’t A Movie Villain
We covered this in a post after Wagner Group’s abortive march on Moscow a couple years ago (“Dodging A Bullet In Russia”):
An Objective Assessment Of Putin
As our friend Benjamin Braddock noted on Twitter, despite Sachs putting Putin in the same category as Lenin and Saddam Hussein, Putin is actually a moderate in the Russian political context.
What Braddock wrote about Putin being a moderate is true, but Putin has also been the best leader for Russians in at least a century. A few statistics illustrate how much better off Russians are since Putin came to power in 1999.
Russian life expectancy is up 11.4% since 1999. As of 2021, the homicide rate in Russia was down 85% since Putin came to power. Russia’s per capita GDP growth has outpaced that of other commodity exporters.
Since racism (and antisemitism) are the worst sins in the West, Western critics sometimes dishonestly claim Putin is a racist, but in fact he has presided over a multiethnic, multi-confessional empire in a way that’s largely been inclusive rather than divisive. In some ways, Russia has handled its diversity better than the U.S. has.
It may seem odd to write about Putin’s restraint when we’re three years into an military operation in the Ukraine that he launched, but it’s worth noting how he has so far eschewed retaliating against Western provocations such as the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. Consider how many potential targets for retaliation the United Kingdom alone has in the North Sea.
If Putin were the maniac some in the West claim he was, the Ukraine War would have been wiped out completely or spiraled into World War III months ago. Only now, at the end of the war, do world leaders see the measured and careful moves Putin made primarily to protect the Russian regions in the East. They have been Russian for more than 300 years.
The color revolution of Victoria Nuland tried to kill them all or force them to migrate to Russia. Now, the world sees it for what it was. Thanks to the antics of Z-boy in his green pajamas in the Oval Office, even the left can see it for what it is.
More than three times as many civilians have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s invasion than have been killed in the Ukraine since Russia’s invasion (according to UN estimates, 12,600 civilians have been killed in the Ukraine and 46,600 in Gaza). Granted, Gaza is much more densely populated than the Ukraine and has militants mixed in with the population.
The point stands that our media’s coverage of Russia is hostile, biased, and unhelpful to those such as President Trump who seek a diplomatic solution to a conflict that has already cost the lives of far too many Ukrainians and Russians.
SF Source Brooks Agnew Mar 2025