Maybe it was just friendliness towards Russian people? This war is entirely political. Most Russians don't seem to want to invade other countries.
This is true for basically every people every time in history. People care about food, family, a house, medical care. All is well until some government starts pushing them into a warring state of mind.
Examples from the previous generation of European wars, when Italy invented fascism, Germany followed suit ten years later and both countries started to think about land grabs in Europe and Africa. We got WW2 first but only 12 years after the end of it France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux started the process [1] that led to the current EU. All friends again.
My bet: without the current leadership and their propaganda very few Russians would think about invading other countries so be ready to reach out to them when it will be all over. What we don't have to do is to start a process like the one that led Germany from the defeat in WW1 to desires of revenge and WW2, or Russia from the defeat in the Cold War to the current attempt to create its empire again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Community
Russian fascism runs for multiple generations. Russia never was democratic. Russian mentality is to have an aggressive leader ("бьёт - значит любит").
Navalny is perceived as an alternative to Putin, but he supported Crimean annexation and Georgian war. There is no evidence the remedies that worked for Nazi Germany will work for Russia.
I note, grimly, that your positive example (Germany and Italy post-WW2) was precipitated by the total defeat, occupation and renovation of those two states by the victors of the war. That is not possible in the current situation, where the best case outcome is that Russia retreats to pre-2014 borders with Ukraine.
Actually I wonder if the Kremlin really fears an invasion. We were happy to pay for anything we wanted from Russia.
What are you basing this on?
https://www.levada.ru/en/ratings/
This seems to show strong support for the Russian government and this analysis seems to suggest that few Russians are concerned about Russians crimes and as many as half are very supportive of horrific violence against people they see as nonhuman.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2022.2...
But you're not wrong, lots of people just went full nazi
Putin nor his supporters haven't gone full nazi. Full fascist, perhaps. Nationalist, definitely.
He used the "denazify Ukraine" slogan when Zelenskyy is actually Jewish not because of deep seated racial or religious motivations, but just to get more of the populace to buy his belligerent cause. Putin just cares about Crimea, Sevastopol, and the strategic importance of the Black Sea (oil and military).
He's just using Ukrainians instead of Jewish folks seems more like an implimentation detail. Even hating them is completely optional.
People aren't just using Nazi as a purjorative the regime literally fits a template.
They also believed in "survival of fittest" and competition. That influenced the way they build institutions and how they treated sick etc. They liked to have two institutions with same goal and have them compete. Russia is different in all three points. It does not care much about own disabled, but they are not seen as threat the way Germans seen disabled. Russian parents with sick kid dont have to be afraid to go to see doctor for example.
> He's just using Ukrainians instead of Jewish folks seems more like an implementation detail. Even hating them is completely optional.
Both ideologies are very very different in how they treat subjects, actually. For instance, Ukrainians became subject of genocide after they refused Russia domination - Jews had no such option. Russians claim Ukrainians are Russia by blood and deserve punishment for considering themselves apart. Meanwhile, many many German Jews considered themselves Germans. That is underappreciated point - but a lot of them were German patriots, veterans of WWI, married ethnical Germans and were atheists.
Edited to add: Russia is also significantly less totalitarian them Germany was back then. It is autocracy/dictatorship, but it is not nearly as oppressive internally as Nazi Germany was. Timing is different too, its move toward complete lock of press happened only after invasion of Ukraine - contrast with German who did that long before military moves.
Russians now feel as though they're under attack by the West with an ends of destroying them not only economically and politically but also culturally. That is going to send support soaring with the perceived threat there is orders of magnitude greater than something like Bin Laden. So you're not going to be able to get level-headed responses until [likely many] years after this ends - similar to how if you polled the average American circa 2001 you'd get dramatically different views on the actions we took than you would if you asked them a decade later, even beyond the countless discoveries outside the "fog of war".
This is one reason I also think our ongoing response is not the right path forward for any outcome other than escalation. The more we arbitrarily attack anything "Russian", the more we frame ourselves not as an enemy of the war but as an enemy of the Russian people and even the Russian culture. And far from achieving a de-escalation, this just seems it will inevitably march us that much closer to WW3.
Most Russians that a typical HN user would encounter — English-speaking, educated, probably with skills in demand inside and outside Russia — don't.
Typical Russians, on the other hand, are quite openly fascist at this point.