Let's bust some propaganda. Top 10 pro-Ukrainian talking points - and why they're nonsense.⬇️

10. Ukraine is a democracy! False. The last free and fair election in Ukraine - not held under an ultranationalist jackboot after the 2014 coup - was in 2010. All elections in Ukraine have been suspended since 2022, and Zelensky's five-year term from 2019 expired months ago.

9. Russia is an autocracy! False. Vladimir Putin and United Russia enjoy approval ratings among the Russian public that are extremely high, even in polling conducted by Western-backed, anti-Putin organizations. Putin is popular enough to win any election held in Russia handily.

8. There are no Nazis in Ukraine! Oh come on. Ukraine's "founding fathers," Bandera, the OUN/UPA, the Galician SS? Nazis and Nazi collaborators, many implicated in the worst crimes of the Holocaust. Ukraine's most prestigious military units? Packed to the rafters with Nazis.

7. Ukraine is a victim of Russian colonialism! Nikita Kruschev grew up in the Donbass and considered himself to be Ukrainian. Leonid Brezhnev was born and raised near Dnipropetrovsk. Both brought home a great deal of bacon for their home SSR. Kruschev gave it Crimea in 1954.

6. The Russians expected to take Kiev in three days! False and nonsensical. This memetic talking point seems to have originated with US Army General Milley, then-CJCS. No Russian official ever made such a claim, nor did the Kremlin show any desire to overthrow Zelensky in 2022.

6 con't. This can be seen in the fact the Russians started negotiations with the Ukrainian government immediately after invading. Why would they negotiate with people they planned to topple? Of note: The US Army took three weeks to take Baghdad against a prostrate Iraq in 2003.

5. The Russians have taken enormous casualties in Ukraine! False in real terms. The best data available - Mediazona's count of military obituaries plus published casualty figures from the separatist republics - shows no more than 80,000 Russian military KIA over the entire war.

5 con't. Related talking point - the Russians have lost a huge amount of equipment in Ukraine! False in real terms. The Russian military is far larger, far more lethal, and far better equipped today than it was in 2022, with once-rare vehicles like T-90Ms now quite common.

4. Ukrainians want to fight! False. Enormous numbers of Ukrainian men have fled the country, some of them paying eye-watering bribes and facing great dangers, rather than face conscription. And the Ukrainian military is fed by press gangs ruthlessly sweeping for conscripts.

3. Russia's invasion was unprovoked! False. If the last two and a half years have shown us anything it is that by 2022 Ukraine was an armed camp, spoiling for war and run by people with a fanatical hatred of Russia and Russians. Putin gave Zelensky exactly what he asked for.

2. Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine! False. The UN has identified slightly over 10,000 civilians killed during the two and a half years of the war thus far. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian language enjoys official status in Russian Kherson and Zaporozhie, and Tatar in Crimea.

1. Any negotiations with Putin are appeasement! The only route to Ukrainian victory in this war is for NATO to go to war with Russia. That will not happen. Ergo, our policy choice is to acknowledge Russia's victory now ("appeasement") or to have them rub it in our faces later.