Indeed, a good read, thank you for the link.
The tendency to sympathise with Russia has an interesting precedent in the 9/11 terrorist attack, after which some left-leaning intellectuals such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky were surprisingly incapable of admitting that it was an atrocious act indeed, and instead they went to great lengths in describing how awful some American policies had been and were (in itself a correct claim) and that such an attack on civilians was ultimately, sort of, let's face it, how should we put it, entirely justified and right. Christopher Hitchens wrote about this sort of spinelessness rather scathingly and well almost immediately after Said, Chomsky et al. had come out with their anti-American and pro-terrorist points.
This phenomenon has quite a lot to do with the hierarchies that people have in their thinking. I've said it before put I suppose it may bear repeating: almost all people want justice to be done, but if they are faced with a choice of either furthering justice or keeping a friend out of trouble, they tend to (i.e. over 50% will choose to) go for the latter option, at the cost of justice, even at a terrible cost. So while we value justice, we value friends more. A similar phenomenon applies here: "America" or "the West" are very easy epitomes of certain kind of evil, because they definitely and clearly are up to all kinds of questionable things in the world -- but for the most part, people in the West will still tend to side with America or the West when it's a question of choice between that and, let's say, Russia. (I would never ever want to live in America but faced with a choice between that and Russia, there's just no question which one I'd choose.) But there's a certain group of people who sort of vacillate inbetween: in daily life, America and the West represent evil, and when Russia (or some other entity not from the West) gets up to something utterly dreadful, they start to come up with excuses about how, surely, the West must also be to blame, and so on. This group is quite distinct from those who overtly and consistently support Russia all the time.
One good example is the question of NATO expansion, such as it is. NATO doesn't really intend to expand. NATO gets new members because various countries feel threatened enough by Russia so that they wish to get some extra protection, and that's why they apply for membership. Russia, of course, steadfastly refuses to see this. One other thing (among many many many many) that Russia steadfastly refuses to see is that as a sovereign nation, Ukraine gets to do whatever it wants to (within international law), so whether it chooses to apply for NATO membership is none of Russia's business, in the same way that it's none of my business whatsoever whether my neighbor wants to join the Labor Union or Amnesty International or any of those groups probably still going strong in Judea. If I start whining about it, it almost certainly indicates that I have a problem.