I think there's been a problem for decades, where some individuals on the far left endorse a brain-dead version of anti-imperialism, in which anything that is considered anti-western is good. We saw, in the 1970s, people apologizing for the Khmer Rouge. We saw people shilling for Maoist China. We saw people apologizing for the Cultural Revolution. This is not a new phenomenon.
Dimitri Lascaris fits into this long tradition of people on the fringe of the left doing this kind of behaviour. Regarding his work, I was only invited to speak here about three days ago, so I wasn't able to systematically go through some of his content, but I did take a quick look today and yesterday. One example that stood out was an article that he wrote when he visited Russia. It was titled “10 Days in Moscow”. There was a segment there concerning Putin's regime legitimacy. There were approximately 24 paragraphs, of which about 22 justified Putin's rule. It basically said that most Russians love Putin, and this is why their living standards are great. He did mention the repression of dissent, but there was only about a paragraph and a half of that. I thought that spoke quite loudly to his approach to this topic.
When I interviewed him last year, one of the things that stood out to me was his insistence that neo-Nazism is a problem in Ukraine, a significant one. I asked him how he was able to justify this, given that far-right parties have never had more than 2% of the vote since 2014. He seemed a little bit confused by that, and he emphasized a few anecdotal accounts that would suggest that maybe some far-right figures have outsized influence in Ukraine. At that point, I mentioned that LGBTQ and Jewish Ukrainians disagree, and they've said that there is no issue with the far right in Ukraine—not any significant one—and that it's being exaggerated. He seemed unwilling to believe that, which I thought was also quite illuminating.