Sohrab Ahmari is quoted muttering darkly that near-universal support for Ukraine reflects, not the justice of their cause, but rather the success of “mind control strategies.” He goes on to write about Ukraine as if the whole thing is a conspiracy directed by State Department hawks, particularly Victoria Nuland who “in 2013 went down to Maidan Square to personally supervise the velvet revolution.” The article he links to with the phrase “personally supervise” is not some exposé of a secret American conspiracy. It’s a perfectly non-sensational news report about Nuland making a single visit to Kyiv to meet the protesters and talk with both sides.

A petition signed by these anti-interventionists blames the conflict on “leading interventionists in the United States and Europe” who are “goading the West into an abyss of war and suffering.” The people of Ukraine appear in this narrative only as “victims,” who “bear the brunt of Russia’s aggression and of the [Western] attempt to bog down Moscow in a long, devastating insurgency.”

One suspects much of this is a dodge by those who have long been sympathetic to Putin’s regime and the dream of using authoritarianism to promote religious traditionalism, which fits well with the ideals of the “nationalist” and “integralist” Right. But their resulting portrait of events in Ukraine is one in which the Ukrainian people have little or no agency, in which they are merely pawns on a chessboard in a game planned out in a State Department conference room.