Apologies for starting from far away. In my defense: when one's starting point is "your opponent thinks you are a paid troll", one has to tread lightly. I was

Apologies for starting from far away. In my defense: when one's starting point is "your opponent thinks you are a paid troll", one has to tread lightly. I was trying to provide context. You saw an article in Time Magazine. Try as you might, you can't just dismiss it as a work of a Russian troll. You have to actually read it, engage with it, and discuss the content instead of dismissing it out of hand and moving on. Notice that we are not debating whether US lobbying consultants were involved. We are discussing the magnitude of their involvement, and whether or not their participation was paid for appropriately. You have to agree that this is higher quality discussion. OK, so we agreed that these firms were involved. How involved were they? I'll leave another link in this trail of breadcrumbs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_affair. Predicting your next rebuttal ("but there's no link to the US"): yeah, there's more. In conclusion: it is absolutely true that other countries have done to Russia exactly what they are outraged about now. You can choose to be OK with that.