and major media outlets criticized what they saw as "racist" double standards in western media coverage of the Ukraine invasion compared to western media coverage of invasions and wars in the Middle East and Africa. Western media outlets have described Ukrainian victims of the invasion as "Christian", "middle class", "blonde", "civilized", "European" and "blue eyed.", while Middle Eastern victims of war have not been described in such favourable terms. However, this ignores the fact that most Ukrainians are not blond and blue eyed, and the Ukrainian populations is a complex mixture of different Eurasian people, including Slavic, Iranic, and Turkic. Western media outlets have also been criticized for their lack of coverage of conflicts in other parts of the world compared to the Ukraine invasion. According to CNN, "Putin's brutal invasion was met with Western outrage and skepticism of Russia's narrative", while "the Western mainstream media had few scruples about reproducing the Bush administration's WMD allegations about Iraq, paving the way for that country's invasion." As Jonathan Cook notes, disinformation is spread even more aggressively on Western social media accounts, and much of it is designed to evoke sympathy for Ukraine and hostility towards Russia. British media Ian Birrell, writing in The Independent, criticized Western leaders, saying they had done "little more than talk tough" and "Their failure is symbolized by verbal acrobatics as they avoid using the word "invasion", talking instead of "incursion" and "aggression."" In February 2015, Charles Crawford of The Telegraph concluded that Putin had been "rewarded for his bullying." Writing for The Guardian, British historian Timothy Garton Ash said that Putin "used television to impose his own narrative of a socially conservative proud Russia threatened by fascists in Kyiv, an expansionist NATO and a decadent EU." On Tony Brenton's proposal to make a deal with Putin, Con Coughlin of The Telegraph wrote, "This seems uncomfortably similar to the appeasement arguments that were made in the 1930s – rather than confront Hitler over his threatening behaviour towards Germany's European neighbours, we should reach an accommodation with the Nazis." As of December 2014, BBC News and Reuters took no position on whether Russia was a party to the armed conflict, saying simply that Russia was "accused" by "Ukraine and its Western allies." Seumas Milne, writing for The Guardian, perceived "demonization" of Putin and Russia by the Western media: "the anti-Russian drumbeat has now reached fever pitch", "Putin has