https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter

Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1979, and later from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and departmental honors. In 1980 he served in the U.S. Army as a private. Then in May 1984 he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps. He served in this capacity for about 12 years.[2] He served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. Ritter's academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in Soviet Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Fazail Maksum and Ibrahim Bek.[3][4] During Desert Storm, he served as a ballistic missile advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network. Ritter also had "a long relationship [...] of an official nature" with the UK's foreign intelligence spy agency MI6 according to an interview he gave to Democracy Now! in 2003.

That's Scott Ritter's background. What's yours? Oh, we can't tell because you've used a throwaway account, which of course is your right. But I would suggest that if you go around insinuating about a person's character you'd better have some sort of proof or evidence to back it up. But the best you can do is:

> The interviewer appears to be a writer for RT.

So he's written op-eds for Russia Today. The way you state it without elaboration it's like we're meant to fill in the blanks. I'm sorry, are we not allowed to write for news organisations any more? Yes, we all know what you're implying, Russia Today is some kind of unAmerican news corp. Tell you what, let's bring back the House Committee on Un-American Activities and drag Scott before them.

God damn it, humans are so disappointing. As to:

> Scott Ritter starts arguing that the invasion was a reasonable response to problems with right-wing extremists in the Ukrainian military (which I've heard is a problem in many countries, not only in Ukraine).

Listening comprehension much? He never said that. He said, contrary to what the regular media is portraying there are actually neo-Nazi elements within Ukrainian military which (given the Russians history with Nazism – you know, how they more or less single-handedly beat back Nazis until the UK and USA got their shit together) explains what Putin meant in his hour long speech pre-invasion and allied to the eastward expansion of NATO shows that the Russian response while a gross violation of Ukrainian sovereignty is entirely rational, and given Putin's demands, entirely predictable.

But because we (the West) have to be the good guys – our adversaries must, by definition, be either evil or tyrannical or insane or any combo of all of these characteristics.

Heaven forbid that we might have a hand in all this, also heaven forbid that we look critically at our own part in all of this. And heaven forbid we try to imagine other people around the world as human beings like us with concerns (whether legitimate or not it doesn't really matter) about national security like us.