Both discussions seem perfectly civil and valuable. I wonder why both are now flagged??
Because people use flags as superdownvotes for posts which are inconvenient for their worldview (among other things). Some people just flag everything non-tech-related too.
In general, many Russians are pro-Putin, and this includes HN-ers. I noticed they don't like it when negative news about Russia are discussed. And the usual mechanism for canceling a discussion on HN is to flag it.