So more of them can protest. Not sure if you've seen the latest news and videos, Russians aren't even trying to fight soldiers anymore, they're just straight-up bombing apartment complexes...
I have absolutely no sympathy for any Russian until there's no more bombs killing Ukrainian civilians. Maybe more incentive to depose Putin.
You have no sympathy for people who will be beaten, jailed or worse for simply peacefully protesting the war their country is waging?
And I might if Russia wasn't literally bombing apartments without even attempting to fight the Ukrainian military...
They should think about what living with Putin for another 15 years will look like...
Yeah, there is a point where the regime switches from handcuffs to tanks and machine guns to discourage repeats.
(And, yes, enough, particularly of the people in the right positions, can defeat that, too, but the outcome tends to be ... unpredictable.)
What precisely do you think happens to those organizers in Russia when they defy their dear leader's sacred mission? A brief stint in jail? I think the best case scenario is nothing cruel happens to their family. But their life is essentially forfeit.
Besides, we had the largest protests in US history to prevent the invasion of Iraq. I was at many of them. They did absolutely nothing to stop that war.
The fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 happened at such a different time in world history (smaller differences between the state's military capabilities and individuals military capabilities, more diffused knowledge of warfare among civilians due to frequent occurrence of wars, greater difficulty in monitoring communications due to older forms of technology, etc) that it doesn't serve to offer many lessons to modernity.
If anything Putin's Russia is much closer to China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement than Gorbachev's USSR.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
Without the protests, the coup by forces not willing to give up the USSR against Gorbachev would have succeeded.
Vietnam, Central America, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. Never-ending, ongoing economic sanctions leveled against a myriad of countries which destroy the lives of ordinary people.
Israel, whose oppression against the Palestinians we actively support and fund, blows up an apartment building in the Gaza Strip and it makes the news for a day, and here we are incredulous when this happens in the Ukraine. We are, this very moment, engaged in the wanton murder of civilians, either directly through drone strikes or indirectly via the supply of weapons, like the ones used to bomb Yemenese today.
What then of your sanctimony? Where the hell is your outrage towards and condemnation of Americans, or of NATO or other US allies that tolerate our behavior? Americans and our allies objectively share responsibility for the largest portion of the sum total of evil acts occurring on this planet, and yet most of us, like you, act and speak as if this isn’t the case. Absurd.
The US doing shitty things doesn't mean Russia isn't doing shitty things, right now.
Whataboutism and a tangent though for sure.
This is a strawman.