The Estonian lady doth protest too much

In public, she demands Russia be fully isolated. In private, well...it's complicated.

It’s one of the oldest cliches in the book:¹ the person who is the most vocal and strident about a particular moral issue is living a very different kind of lifestyle when he thinks no one is watching.

The social conservative politician or preacher who is secretly gay and/or having affairs is arguably the best-known example. That the current Republican standard-bearer makes little to no effort to hide his cheating, and if anything flouts his infidelity, is a sign of…progress, I guess?

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve long observed that any man who seems to be trying way too hard to look like a feminist is someone with whom no woman should ever be left alone. When a man says some variation on, “the world would be so much better if women ran it” or “women are so much smarter than us,” he’s officially on the clock for getting #MeToo-ed.

Aw dammit.

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On its face, this wouldn’t appear to have much to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor those helping the Ukrainians fight back. In my experience, people who support Russia are open about it, or at least engage in whataboutism and deflection and “realism,” instead of publicly waving the Ukrainian flag while privately arguing that Ukraine is a fake country run by Nazis.

And yet, when I read the latest news about the strongly pro-Ukraine Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and her husband’s continuing business dealings in Russia, I immediately thought back to her comments about collective responsibility for Russian crimes:

If you don’t want to fight for Putin and Russia, too bad. Go back and overthrow him.

And if you had business interests in Russia before the invasion, well…I mean…you gotta eat, right?