The problem is that in the West people must choose sides, so Ukraine is bad because it is backed by the “Left” in the West and thus the far right must dislike it.
An added aspect in US domestic politics is the sense that former US president Donald Trump was impeached for his involvement in Ukraine, and was also accused of being pro-Putin.
Therefore the far right that is sympathetic to Trump tends to like Putin, and also think Ukraine is some kind of center of corruption, used by “globalists” like George Soros to push some kind of “European” agenda.
In this narrative, Ukraine is not really a cause for freedom fighters because it isn’t really a good democracy – it is “flawed” and has “oligarchs.” What about Russia’s oligarchs and lack of democracy? That doesn’t matter in this telling, because the assertion is that defending Ukraine “isn’t in our interests,” and we are being lied to about it being a democracy.
In this narrative also there is some memory that the cause of Ukraine was embraced by the Obama administration, and that the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by an Obama-backed Euromaidan protest.
Since some on the Right despise Obama, Ukraine’s current government must be bad. Since Trump was maligned for being linked to Russia, and since Ukraine is a “Biden/Obama project,” Ukraine is bad and Russia is right to invade.
This interweaving of US domestic politics therefore is not really about Ukraine, it is about getting back at domestic rivals. If the US center-left likes Ukraine, then the far right must support Russia in this domestic international foreign affairs proxy war.
When we dig deeper into the bizarre logic behind it, we find voices at the recent conservative CPAC convention that the US has no reason to care for Ukraine, thousands of miles away.
Some right-wing commentators have created this kind of straw man argument, positing that: “We are told to hate Putin, but why should I hate Putin? He didn’t cause the opioid crisis in America.”
This false dichotomy says that Putin isn’t really an enemy of the US, so just let him be in eastern Europe and that’s fine. This isolationist agenda generally sees Ukraine as simply “not our problem,” and is in line with 200 years of American isolationism that sees European wars as Europe’s problem.
Source: Some on the far-right in the US oppose Ukraine, why? – analysis – The Jerusalem Post
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