“Russia-Ukraine war: The West must stop its unconditional support for Kyiv”;
Western coverage of the war in Ukraine emphatically casts Russia’s President Putin as fiendish and President Zelensky of Ukraine as heroic. Given that Russia violently invaded and Ukraine has valiantly resisted, this is unsurprising. Alain Gabon argues in a new challenging essay that this is, however, a perilously abridged way to frame this terrible dispute.
Alain Gabon is an associate professor at Virginia Wesleyan University in the US. In a recent essay entitled, “Russia-Ukraine war: The West must stop its unconditional support for Kyiv” he argues that, regardless of how understandable the detestation of President Putin may be, the Western veneration of President Zelensky has reached “absurdist levels”. He forcefully documents why he takes this view.
Gabon also argues how the US-led West, saluted by Kyiv, is sidelining negotiation as still more weapons are shipped into Ukraine, thus helping “to escalate the conflict with devastating global implications”. A key aspect of Gabon’s case is that the least-bad resolution of this intense conflict demands far more “jaw-jaw” input and much less “war-war” advocacy.
You can read the full essay here: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/russia-ukraine-war-west-unconditional-support-kyiv-stop.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.