I think you and I have a different definition of "wonderful." The fact that we can only debate about the start of a civil war that started in 2014 in 2022, after that war has expanded nearly to WWIII is a testament to how close-minded the west has become again.

Setting the bar at, "we're not as bad as Russia or China" should be a really low fucking bar to clear. The fact that the best we can manage is to say we in the West are not as bad as two governments that are depicted as massively authoritarian (rightly or wrongly is a debate for another day) says directly that we don't have much confidence in our open-mindedness.

Looking at Ivan Katchanovski's Wikipedia page you can see that it took six years before anyone would take a Ukrainian scholar's work seriously - even though the research remained the same. We've learned from the #TwitterFiles, is massively influenced by the US MIC.

This does NOT prove the "open-mindedness of the west" to my mind. Instead it is following a pattern that we've seen over and over since Vietnam. We find out AFTER a war is so far along that there is no going back that the war was justified on wholely or partially false pretenses. Not mistakes, lies.

- Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam

- Incubator babies in Iraq I

- Ethnic cleansing in Serbia

- WMD in Iraq II

- Viagra rapes in Libya

- False flag gas attacks in Syria

- The Maidan coup false flag

etc.

In every case, years later "everyone" agrees that "mistakes were made" and "intelligence was bad" but in every case it was not that intelligence was bad but that a cassus belli was produced to whip up war frenzy in the general public to get troops and/or weapons flowing. Once the war is going, it would be political suicide for a high-ranking politician to state we should immediately stop fighting and pull back.

After 60 years the same exact pattern repeating is not a mistake, it is a strategy.

REAL open-mindedness (IMO) would be discussing research like Ivan Katchanovski's BEFORE we go to war or support a coup, not years after.