Leonid Ragozin gives a damning verdict on the war in Ukraine on Al-Jazeera’s website.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now drags into its third year of destruction and uncertainty in Europe. Uncertainty has now been fuelled by Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his seeming hostility towards the Ukrainian cause and their president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, especially after the verbal confrontation in the Oval Office.

Al-Jazeera gave Leonid Ragozin the pen to express his opinion on the matter. Considering all he writes about is Russia and Ukraine this is not surprising.

‘The blame game over the debacle in Ukraine has started,’ is a lengthy opinion piece that tries to present the idea that Ukraine has already in essence been defeated and that it is a wasted effort by the EU and the United States to try and justify to the public to continue funding it.

Throughout the piece Mr Ragozin continuously pushes the idea that it is the fault of Ukraine and the west for the war and how long it has carried on for, using words and phrases like exhausted, Ukrainian defeat and constant references to the inevitability of the latter. Also repeatedly referring to deals Ukraine could have had nearly echoing the words out of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s mouths, all of which would have undermined their sovereignty mind you.

My favourite piece of this article is that Ragozin ends it by calling Vladimir Putin a man grounded in reality, before being met with in big bold letters, “the views expressed in this article are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Al-Jazeera’s editorial stance.” It feels very much like a dig at the articles content.

The article itself kept me wanting to read more, mostly out of curiosity for how much more I disagreed with everything that was written, that theme was constant for me anyways.

I understand that you must allow different viewpoints to be heard in journalism but what feels like a pro-Russian victory rejoicing feels hilariously out of place on a platform like Al-Jazeera. Especially considering they placed what is for lack of a better word a retraction at the end in bolder font than the headline was.

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Image credit @PippaN15 on X