I think you misread the sentence: Morozov's sympathies are with "Moscow's counterparts", i.e., Russian chauvinist hackers.

And yes, as a former professional Sovietologist and current geopol analyst, I have to agree that I fail to understand how anyone (except craven West Europeans worried more about natural gas prices than human beings) could possibly side with a resurgent fascist Russia barbarically invading a tiny democratic neighbor. This invasion was planned many months, if not longer, ago, and isn't primarily about a small land grab. It's "pour encourager les autres", and it's worked, with Kaplan's statements in evidence. The Ukrainians, Poles, and Baltic states certainly understood the message immediately, and a divide in NATO between the corrupt complacent compromising West and those who actually have something to lose, which had been papered over during the rush to enlarge the alliance for cheap political purposes, has been exposed. The future of the alliance as more than an old man's dinner club depends on the reaction, or lack thereof, by the putative democracies therein to this crisis.

I agree with Kaplan on the administration's fecklessness, which has a distinguished historical pedigree: the list of nations that the US encouraged to uprising and then abandoned is long: the Yugoslav republics, the Marsh Arabs, the Hungarians, the Czechoslovaks, the Poles, numerous groups in Southeast Asia, etc. But to argue that a sovereign nation's exercise of its rights of self defense and freedom of association are provocations justifying murder and pillage simply because that country happens to share a border with a paranoid, aggressive empire, is vile. If Kaplan's next door neighbor were a psychopath with a history of mass murder and recent threatening statements to harm him if he had friends the lunatic didn't approve of or if he made too much noise, would Kaplan decide the best course of action was to acquiesce, or would he wish for the larger society to take action against the rogue murderer in its midst.

And that need not take the form of all out war against Russia. There was much that was left undone in the past decade vis-a-vis the retrenching Russian Empire, and much that could still be done. I dispute that if Georgia had been a member of NATO, that I would even now be at a mobilization center getting fitted for body armor (I am a military reservist, someone who has more on the line than Kaplan's academic interest). The salient point of any alliance is to deter, not to expel, an invader. If the US and the rest of the West had been consistently resolute (and they have not been since they were last forced to be in the mid-1940s), there is no way that Russia would have dared attack a NATO state. But to reluctantly come around to the inevitable Nazi appeasement comparison, Russia's brutal invasion occurred for the same reason that dogs decide to groom themselves: because they could. They knew that there would be little significant blowback, and at one stroke they could intimidate the old "near abroad" (how illuminating is that phrase of the parochial peasant Russian mindset) as well as European and American "realist" politicians. It's had to blame them, really; it was a supremely rational mmove, given what they have long known about their adversary. And I don't mean Georgia.