Original article is The Economist, and dated July 3rd of 2023.

Are people just hoping if Ukraine to rolls over already things will get cheaper again? Are they so stuck in a “USA/NATO bad” worldview that there’s no room for accepting someone else may be the asshole? Are they afraid of getting nuked? Not actually believing it but personally profiting of the position, be it through votes, attention or money? Something else entirely?

Whatever it is, it’s sad that there’s enough of it going around that Putin still seems to believe that he can grind this war out long enough for western support to decline.

I thought that fits here somehow.

Europe’s “useful idiots”, a cold-war term for unwitting allies of communism, span a wide spectrum. In politics, parties on both the far right and far left disagree on much; over Ukraine these extremes have often converged in demanding an instant “peace” that would in effect reward Russian aggression with land. In the media and academe, intellectuals still seem happy to ignore evidence of Russia’s imperial intent and its drift into criminality, and to bemoan European entanglement in what they parse as a proxy war between America and Russia, or perhaps, speculating more grandly still, between America and China. And in the world of business, despite multiple rounds of Western sanctions, Russia still has plenty of “friends” too.