Russians truly are the bad guys on this planet.
I just want to draw an important distinction between the Russian government, military leadership, & voluntary/willing soldiery and the average Russian citizen. It would be wrong to call the latter "the bad guys", but not the former.
Thank you.
Russian here, protested against the war and find it terrifying, not buying official narratives of nazis and NATO threat for a second.
Still remember the 24th of February, 2022. Before the date, we were all like "naive Westerners, Russia will not openly attack Ukraine, that's so obviously stupid on so many levels, it's a brotherly nation going through turbulent times, that's it". No one could in their sane mind even comprehend something like this. It was unthinkable. No one wanted that aside from a few select extremists, and most people never supported it later on - though propaganda machine did make some progress on the weakest of minds.
And then we wake up that day, on 24th of February, and have a collective "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK PUTIN WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THAT OH WE'RE ALL SO SCREWED". It was a very grim day, and everyone had worries of their own: some, like me, had friends and family in Ukraine, some were afraid of their men being drafted (which did eventually happen in September 2022), others were just terrified of the scale of human suffering it will entail.
Since then, we learned never to trust anything and question everything we believe in. It was a cultural shock like Russia has never seen.
Same day, 24th of February, streets sparked in violent protests, police got extremely brutal - to this day, almost 2 years into the war, police has constant 24/7 presence in the places that were the main anti-war protest venues of my city. It lasted for months, despite police never stopping and detaining extreme numbers of people: courts are still overburdened processing all of them. All until everyone who had integrity and bravery and nothing to lose got in jail.
Putin should pay for all the atrocities he has committed, and that's something very many Russians will subscribe to.
As a Lithuanian, I actually disagree. We always knew that a day like February 24 would come. We kept telling that to our allies and they thought we were being paranoid.
You have to address the deep sense of Russian imperialism before we can take you seriously. Even the Russians who have lived in my country for 30 years or more have it. "We are Russians" they say. "We want the world; we want it and we won't stop until we have all of it."
I also know that people like you exist, and some people resisted, but our collective fear is that people like you are a smaller minority than you would think.
Same here, as a Czech, the Russian narrative that all Slavic people should be united under them doesn't really help with a good night sleep. I've been just waiting for Russia to wage another of its wars for at least 15 years. I'm not happy that I was right, but this was very much expected.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Lithuania is often considered very anti-Russia, similar to other Baltic states, as attributed to a history of Soviet occupation and all the outcomes of it, so it's natural that alarms raised by such country are more easily dismissed. At some point, this really could be paranoia; at another, it stopped being one. The art is in figuring out where one ends and the other begins.
As per imperialism - it is common in almost every country with big territory, population, large economy and military. US (above all), China and other powers have it too. I'm not saying it's not ugly, I'm just pointing out it's a general trend that should be approached more systemically - and until then, cultural shifts can only get us so far. I wonder what would it take to remove imperialist tendencies in every place in the world.
We are not anti-Russia, we are simply pro-survival. Even before the Soviet occupation, tsarist Russia did a lot to destroy our national identities, in Lithuania, they forbade writing our language in Roman alphabet and hunted smugglers that carried books written in it. The ban and other repressions caused several massive rebellions including 1830s and 1860s ones.
The Tsar later sent his hound, Muravjov, who hanged so many men that the line of gallows went from Kaunas to Vilnius (~90 km). They have put a statue of Muravjov outside of Lithuanian consulate in Kaliningrad. I guess they are going to put a statue of Adolf Hitler outside the Israeli consulate next /s
And imperialism is common among big countries, sure, but it is Russians who enflame their local minorities in neighbouring countries and then rush to save them. And we do have a Russian minority.
My point is, due to all this complicated and violent history, Lithuania will obviously be on a higher alert than many other countries - that's what I'm saying first and foremost. This means a lot of false alarms, which the rest of the world recognizes, and which is why those early warnings didn't help.
But thanks for making your point, it is important to the understanding of the problem as well.
Genuine question - could you provide examples of open high-level hostilities Russia has shown to Baltic or other countries related to Russian minorities? Cause from the inside it looks mostly as showing concern over Russians having their culture stripped away in order to force assimilation. Don't know much on how it's going in Lithuania in particular, but I have ethnic Russian relatives in Latvia and many of the restrictions imposed, language and cultural, seem very unreasonable and hostile.
The whole "but every country is imperialist" is kinda weird to say, dude, considering Russia is the only one atm currently involved in an invasion
I'm not saying this to distract someone; I'm pointing it out to say that the solution to imperialism lies in some sort of global shift and not local cultural effort. Cultures of superpowers will inevitably gravitate towards imperialism, and we need to find a way to stop it at its root.
Honestly, discussing Russia's economy as large in the same breath as the US and China is a bit disingenuous. US GDP is around 27 trillion USD, China around 18 trillion USD. Russia? 2 trillion USD.
Source for figures: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/explainers/top-10-largest-economies-in-the-world/86159/1. Even if we dispute the specific numbers, an order of magnitude is an order of magnitude.
Edit: typo
I could try to address that disagreement. I'm inclined to assume that you, and citizens of other European countries that had a substantial number of Russians living there, tend to get this impressions exactly from those Russians. Russians who doesn't live in Russia, and social media related to them. My impression is that they are much more crazy than average Russian living in Russia. The latter are uneducated enough to believe that the west wants to conquer Russia, but the former are idiotic enough to assume they are in some privileged position, and that mist Russians think the same. In reality the rest of Russians don't have time to indulge in such fantasies and really busy with their lives.
So I'm saying the imperialism exists in a minority of Russians. The irony is that the president is with the minority and that's why we are in current situation. He got crazy enough with time that he disconnected with majority of the Russians.
I think it's useless to blame regular Russians in imperialism. But it might be useful to put some pressure on those Russians living outside Russia to make sure they think less about possibility to improve their lives by conquering some country.
A lot of Russians I deal with are young and well adjusted, only the old and the poor believe in Russian propaganda. My hometown, sadly, was home to both. When Lithuanians tell them to go to Russia if they love it so much, they get really quiet though.
The Russians from Russia who afford to travel are also notorious for being annoying and disrespectful tourists throughout Southeast Asia and various other places. Even in online games they stick to each other instead of playing with people from various countries.
I disagree about the Russians in Russia, I think the blame is on Russians, they are the ones who have kept Putin in power for so long. If the Dutch government started taking about retaking Indonesia or Belgian goverment wanted to take Congo back, they would be gone from power tomorrow.
I think one issue with your last argument is that the Dutch and Belgians are democratic and have the ability to remove government officials from power peacefully.
Despite what Russia pretends to be it is not Democratic. It is authoritarian. Putin is the ruler and no Russian can get rid of him by voting, it would have to be a violent revolution or civil war.
That's much more to expect for an average Russian than simply showing up to a ballot box. Although I don't excuse their complacency I do understand it.
Wow thanks for sharing this. Mind if I ask, from your personal perspective/experience, how is the situation now? Did the propaganda work at brainwashing people over the past years?
I'd say at first it did work on a lot of people from TV generation, forming a picture of Ukrainian soldiers as Nazis driven by drugged President who is a puppet of american dementia man, and of Russian soldiers liberating people from insanity.
At its peak, even some of the generally anti-war individuals fell into uncertainty.
But the longer it drags, the less effective propaganda is. War exhausted country's resources and killed its men, and this becomes clear even to past die-hard supporters of the war. Also, the dissolution of Wagner group made Wagner fans (which constituted a large percentage of pro-war individuals) more bitter towards the military effort.
So in general, the sentiment goes more and more towards "why are we waging this war in the first place" and "how much longer do we have to suffer"
:(
You use TOR to share this?
So sorry mate!
I'm not saying anything remotely illegal, but I'm just gonna say we do have anonymizing instruments when we really need them.
Thanks for voicing it!
Is there an actual history of this sort of thing or is it only from Inglorious Basterds?
That movie makes it feel like a timeless tradition, doesn't it?
I've never seen it anywhere but in that movie (not a historian fwiw). So I'm fairly confident that it's just the Russians being their usual asshole selves.
They couldn’t even draw it correctly, this is a religious symbol, if you angle it so it looks like an X in the middle, then you have the Nazis swastika.
Reminds me of this classic meme
Heill Hortler
That bottom center one will always be my favorite.
They’re all special in their own way. Each one of god’s little miracles.
I couldn't have even guessed that they were trying to draw a swastika with that one.
The Nazis didn't fucking care, this is just the dumb shit Nazis say online to gaslight you about other Nazis doing Nazi things.
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