Classy. FYI the population is not invading, the government and military is. You can go there and take a look, its not too hard to go and see that the people are normal people like anyone else. You can even talk to them.
Edit, yes, it's racism. I don't care about whatever power structure you imagine to be necessary, it's in the dictionary.
At the same time, I'm not familiar with any evidence any Russian living abroad is facing "racism". (Most of my family live in US/Canada/Australia).
I'm in the US, and I just pretend I'm Polish if people ask what kind of Slav I am. Russian gets the shitty comments and nasty remarks.
Not sure what your anecdotal evidence is supposed to mean, but it ends up not meaning much.
Western strategy is based on containing Russia to limit their government's ability to cause harm. Most would prefer that Russians chose overthrow the government and replace it with something more palatable, but so far they have been unable or unwilling to do so. The next best alternative weakening their economy with sanctions. That necessarily hurts ordinary Russians, because they are part of the same economy as the government.
It's not racism, because your family is being punished for their actions. It may feel unfair, but the world is unfair.
As long as Rwandans pay their taxes, they are contributing to recruiting child soldiers. This is a good reason to be shitty to Rwandans in general, no matter where they are in the world.
My family is in Russia, they're fine. I'm the one experiencing the racism. Justify that.
You also mentioned the US invasion of Iraq. Sanctions against the US would have been justified at that time, but they were impossible, because the US was too big to sanction. Around that time, there were serious discussions in Europe whether Putin or Bush was the bigger villain. Putin had not gone particularly bad yet, while Bush was obviously a villain. Memories of those years helped Putin maintain a favorable image in Europe far longer than could be justified based on his actions.
That's all immaterial compared to the actual discussion here, and I appreciate you clarifying your position.
But, yeah, I was appalled to see how many folks had so much shit in their heads. There's a very significant fraction of the population that aren't just pro-war but openly hold neo-fascist views (while in a strong denial that those views are such - mental gymnastics with syncretism of incompatible values is a long-held tradition).
Russia is truly a cursed country.
Let's just take the responsibility of yourself and transfer it to some magic place called 'someone else's problem' and you get the shit we have today.
You forgot to put the quotes around the term "election". Elections in authoritarian states are just a mockery of the term. It was repeatedly mathematically proven that every recent election in Russia was rigged.
Edit: Clarity
There were numerous protests, and they all were suppressed.
> With the russian military bogged down in Ukraine seems like the right time to throw one.
An uprising is not a likely event in a highly atomized society where no one trusts anyone. And Russians were trained to distrust anyone but themselves and their immediate family for at least a century.
Plus, there are plenty of siloviki working on internal affairs, protecting the regime. Witch hunts are all-high since '30s there.
And there's probably no single reason why the history is the way it is. It's absolutely not like "Soviets were there and that's why it is the way it is". There's probably not even two or three or four reasons why - but some complex set of causes and effects that led the world to where it is today.
Don't get me wrong, please. I'm not absolving the responsibility by blaming Soviets for Russian problems. I'm just mentioning one of the potential factors, saying that Soviets had contributed to this.
Soviet legacy is probably way less important than Putin's years. Since USSR fell, Ukrainian people had elected 6 presidents, and Russia had something like two and a half, all hereditary preemniks to each other (and - again - that's not a particular reason why things are the way they are, just another indicator of how different two post-Soviet countries are).
I guess, I should've been more concise and just said that in an atomized society, uprising is considered to be an unlikely event - without trying to delve into reasons why Russian society is atomized.
Not a worry, I appreciate the nuance and I actually agree for the most part with your argument. Historical conditioning is 100% a burden and I agree that system has broken trust across the board in russian society but at some point a combination of living in a low trust/no trust society combined with a horrifying mutation of that system mixed with unrestricted capitalism has to have taken a toll even before being pariah'd and sanctioned to hell and back.
I also know there are Russians that are against this and have put their lives on the line (and lost them) trying to expose putin for what he is and does, I just wish more would follow in their spirit and maybe we can, at least in one section of the world, have a little peace and quiet.
> At the same time, support for the Russian military action has neither increased nor decreased. Three in four Russians (76%) continue to say they support the military operation, with 43 percent expressing strong support and 33 percent somewhat supporting it.
Apologies if I accidentally condemn the 24% of Russians who aren't neofascists (and yet, can't be bothered to protest, lest the state get upset).
You go to prison for making anti-war statements in Russia, you know?
https://meduza.io/en/news/2023/11/08/prosecution-requests-ei...
Eight. Fucking. Years. For some anti-war price tags. The same sentence you get if you plant drugs as a group of corrupted cops.
https://meduza.io/en/news/2021/06/07/ex-police-officers-conv...
It may shock you to know that in some countries[1], dissidents have been willing to take personal risk of jail time to make their voice heard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
edit: I see from the downvotes that the ethical rules that apply to russian civilians do not apply to USA civilians, for some unknown reason.
One was an illconceived and halfassed attempt to remove an explicitly genocidal dictator, with the goal of replacing him with some fantasy liberal democracy.
The other is an attempt to eliminate a democratically elected government, permanently annex territory, and culturally and linguistically subsume Ukraine into Russia by any means necessary.
It's not the same.