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If they don't care, what point is there to their empire? What claim to moral superiority would they have if they abandoned even Western Europe? You don't believe empires, religions and peoples can have a point. But most believe that some of those are vehicles for genuine values of individual humans to affect reality. Some to good, some to bad ends.
Sure it's mostly bullshit, sure American elites are cynical and exploitative in their own right, sure there's the meta game where unipolarity will probably be catastrophic. Yet Pelosi is making noises supporting Armenia – a de facto unfriendly state – in its time of trial, and Putin is opening a Ferris wheel in Moscow while scores of 200's are rolling into Rostov or are left to rot in Ukrainian soil. It's pretty much impossible to make a coherent moral case for why he's less in the wrong here. As for naked geopolitics, you'll have to invent better epicycles to explain how a hostile empire is better than one you live in.
Kulak. I've brought it up before. My great-grandparents were Kulak Cossacks. They had their own little «revolt» and were curbstomped so hard I only had one blanket and two torn-up photos left as mementos. The folks in Kremlin are institutional, spiritual, legal inheritors of that system. To support them, to excuse them, to downplay their evil is morally bankrupt, and in your particular case plain ridiculous.
Contrarianism is not good enough, because it eventually leads one to contradict oneself right at the core. Please stop doubling down.
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