Nazi Germany in 1942: "Never forget that England imposed this war on us." It is standard for aggressors to present themselves as victims and their victims as aggressors. Today, Russia falsely claims to be the victim of Ukraine, misdescribed as the spearhead of Western aggression.

https://twitter.com/slantchev/status/1680845650810773505

So please be very careful about not reinforcing the lies used to rationalize aggression. It is fatally easy to fall into this trap. The error is to think that we always improve causal insight by "understanding" the other party's perspective, and to say, for example, that

The New Left Review has just published an article by the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Ishchenko entitled “Ukrainian Voices?” Though it has received a lot of praise on left Twitter, I do not think it is a good article. Ishchenko is critical of those calling for the decolonization of Ukraine, meaning an end to the subordination of Ukrainian aspirations to Russian perspectives. Such calls, he says, have turned into a “self-defeating escalation of identity politics.”