Several people who largely share my appraisal of the events in Ukraine and around Ukraine have sent me lots of incredible photographs and articles showing that the "mainstream" Western media got completely obsessed with Vladimir Putin.
Maria Putin
© UnknownThis 29-year-old lady was threatened by a mayor to be deported from Holland and finally she fled the country by herself – taking BF Jorrit Faasen, 34, with her. In the current hysteria, the sufficient reason is the following: she is Maria Putin, Putin's daughter.
It's enough to search Google News for Putin if you want to obtain a rather incredible collection of totally nutty titles and whole articles about Putin. Just some of the titles (I didn't really have to filter it much):
US General Dempsey: Putin May 'Light a Fire' He Can't Stop in Ukraine

Dempsey: Putin's Moves Like 1939 Poland

Putin's voracious appetite is not sated

Putin's Pal [a nasty attack against Stephen Cohen]

Putin's inner circle sheds light on his "sinister, lonely life"

The growing calls to strip Putin and Russia of the 2018 World Cup

Putin's Crime, Europe's Cowardice

Vladimir Putin is responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. His next move will matter most of all.
I could go on and on and on, for hours. Vladimir Putin is perhaps the next Adolf Hitler, maybe Adolf Hitler on steroids. He must have personally shot the Dutch airplane down, too.

Well, I have been following the Ukrainian events since the late 2013 very closely and one may see that Vladimir Putin hasn't done a damn thing. Perhaps the only thing he did was to do nothing ;-) against the Crimeans' efforts to escape a Ukraine that was conquered by a nationalist hysteria. Needless to say, every other Russian leader - and most leaders of other powers - would do exactly the same thing when their currently threatened, historical region massively asked for re-annexation.

But concerning MH17: are you joking? It was probably shot down by a separatist by mistake. Maybe he wanted to shoot a nearby Kiev military plane and it occurred by a very unlucky accident. The Kiev fighter jets have been claimed to hide behind civilian airplanes already a month ago. Maybe the airplane was shot by the Kiev forces in another unlucky accident. But what does Vladimir Putin have to do with any of that?

The missile that destroyed MH17 was arguably Buk [=Beech wood], produced in Russia. But what's unexpected about the Russian origin of weapons that are used thirty miles from Russia? Naturally, Russia is a major producer of weapons. The 300 passengers and crew members died in a piece of metal that was constructed by American hands, by Boeing. And the soldiers may have used iPhones to order others to shoot the plane down. Does it mean that America is responsible? Are you joking?

And even if Russia were "responsible" for that, why Putin?

There are many possibilities why the plane was shot down and nothing can be "quite" eliminated. But Putin's personal role in the sad event is still one of the possibilities close to the theory about the moon landing staged in Arizona. And what about his longer-term, "strategic" responsibility?

I think that it is a totally idiotic idea, too. The plane was officially shot down above the territory of Ukraine. In the case of every other country, the country's government would share a major part of the responsibility for the accident. After all, the government in Kiev was paid for giving the permission to MH17 (and others) to fly over the Donetsk region. Some perpetrators of 9/11 originated from Afghanistan (and were trained in non-governmental camps over there) which was enough for the U.S. to start a war against the whole country - it was a decision that was as "morally understandable" by the world's public as Austria-Hungary's decision to wage a war against Serbia after the 1914 assassination of the prospective emperor.

So of course that among the world's *governments*, the current Kiev government is the most directly responsible one for the downing of MH17. No one seems to even "dare" to think about this self-evident fact in the "mainstream" Western media that have apparently decided that all current rulers of Ukraine are holier than Jesus Christ.

And what about the long-term, strategic, global responsibility? Well, all the suffering including the downing of MH17 may be blamed on those who started this insane "Maidan revolution" based on the idea that Ukraine may assume to live in the vacuum and morph into an anti-Russian country overnight. Nothing bad could come out of it, right? Surely everyone in Ukraine agrees with the complete change of the direction where Ukraine develops and with the overthrowing of the last legitimately elected government.

Well, have you lost your mind? It has always been 100% guaranteed that such developments, often directly and openly encouraged by various powerful agents in the West, including the governments, would lead to a form of a civil war and a huge tension between those who try to "intervene" in this way on one side and Russia on the other side. Among the foreign influences, it's the pro-Maidan Western interventionists who are most responsible for the 1,000 or so dead people since the early 2014, including the casualties of the MH17 tragedy, and for lots of other problems and economic destruction that took place in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin and the government of Russia would play at most a passive role. As far as I can say, he hasn't done a damn thing. But he could have and he may do something important in the future.

If I were the Russian President, I would have probably order the occupation of Ukraine many months ago because I would view these developments to be dangerous for the existential interests of my country. He has been as restrained as you can get. But of course that people understand that he would safely conquer Ukraine if it were the only foe. So I think that people are doing some sort of "psychological projection". They know it's a very natural decision for a power that is being as indirectly harmed as Russia has been since the "Maidan revolution" in Ukraine to protect itself. They may deny that they would think about the defense of their country's interests but it's a fact that every responsible politician in such a power has to think about this option.

Of course that I am not promising you that Vladimir Putin will never invade Ukraine. But given the escalation of the atmosphere - which was done by someone completely different than Vladimir Putin - it would be understandable for him to retake Ukraine. But at this moment, these are pure speculations and fantasies. Vladimir Putin hasn't done a damn thing - except for his nearly pacifist and very pragmatic speeches - which is why all these anti-Putin "mainstream" media don't know what they're talking about.

There are surely hundreds of millions of people in Western countries who have been brainwashed by this totally baseless propaganda. I apologize but I can't respect these people as observers or as human beings, for that matter. One must be an incredibly gullible moron to buy the bulk of this anti-Putin propaganda. The individuals who are buying this crap are much closer to the four-legged sheep, intellectually speaking, than they are to ourselves.

I am scared by this intellectual and moral degradation of the West. I understand very well that this is extremely far from being the first moment when the public of otherwise civilized countries got brainwashed in this way. The anti-Jewish hysteria in Germany of the 1930s was no different from the current anti-Russian hysteria. It was much worse because we already know that the anti-Jewish hysteria had led to 6 million casualties of the Holocaust while the number of casualties of the current anti-Russian hysteria is comparable to 1,000 only. But the analogy between the current atmosphere pumped by the "mainstream" media addressed to the intellectual bottom - and bulk - of the Western nations on one side and an *earlier* moment in the history of Nazi Germany may be a very appropriate one.

So average people, please, try not to be idiots. Or at least, try not to be *complete* idiots. Vladimir Putin didn't shoot MH17 down. You can't divide the Eastern Slavic nations to the "nice ones" like Ukrainians and the "villains" like the Russians. They are pretty much the same people, with the same statistical distributions of pretty much all traits, living in slightly different political situations. Eastern Ukraine has been a multi-national area for many centuries and the people simply have to co-exist in some way. The Russian leaders and the Russian government are doing nothing extraordinary. They are still trying to protect some interests of theirs. Every competent leader is doing it in one way or another - except that some try to mask what they are doing. Everyone who believes that we live in a "brave new world" in which politicians no longer protect any nations' or classes' interests is a lunatic and should relocate himself to a psychiatric asylum.

The people who have decided to see the tensions in the area in a black-and-white way and who still work to influence the events are the true strategic culprits of the misery that escalated over there in 2014. In reality, all the people over there are similar to each other and a violent conflict is unlikely to be good for either side. To spread the propaganda that Vladimir Putin is a villain whom one is obliged to hate are as dangerous and simple-minded psychopaths as the warriors and Islamic bigots in ISIL, among others. The world just isn't this simple. The real post-Soviet world doesn't really resemble the caricature in the "mainstream" Western media at all.