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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

As you suggest, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was bolstered by Russian sympathizers in the east. Every country bordering Russia is incentivized to break free of any sort of alignment with Russia in order to reduce the threat of local insurgency which will aid Russia in its invasion. For example, the Baltic countries removing Russian from their list of official languages, in addition to decoupling from the Russian power grid. There are a lot of steps to be taken, and a lot of them will take decades. Fortunately, Russia's capacity to wage war measured against their number of potential targets means that it would take them decades to reconquer it all, assuming Europe steps up to fund the defense. Train gauge alignment is just one of many steps towards this end, and the sooner the better.

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"Removing Russian from their list of official languages"? It was never an official language in the first place.

In the distant past of the 1990s, it was.

Right, under Soviet military occupation.

There was no military occupation of Finland in the 1990s.

A was referring to the Baltic countries, as per the comment from @kibwen above.

Sorry, my bad.

"Do you have Russian soldiers in Finland?" "Yes, hundreds of thousands" "Where are they stationed?" "Along the border, six feet deep".

It was the case during the Soviet occupation and briefly during the transitional period, but otherwise - no, it wasn't. For example, in 1990, Latvia simply restored its 1922 constitution (still in effect today, although with some amendments) which enacted Latvian as the sole official language. This has also been the case with Lithuanian and Estonian constitutions, respectively.

The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda, which is infinitely more useful to him than any railroad on foreign soil.

He's co-opting the red army's defeat of Nazi Germany for his own popularity purposes. Which is impressive, considering he's also disavowing communism. It would hardly have been possible, if it weren't for fringe (but not fringe enough) movements in Eastern Europe playing along with it. Not because they're pro-Russian, far from it, but because their old nationalist groups often were aligned with the nazis, and they want to rehabilitate them. Putin and these groups totally agree that the conflict should be framed as being between Russia and these groups.

> The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda

This is dangerously naive. Propagandists like Putin don't need real grievances, they're happy to invent grievances and brainwash the population into believing them. In light of this fact, there's zero downside and nonzero upside to decouple from Russia (at least for any state which intends to remain independent) which makes it a no-brainer.

What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.

Or maybe you accept that you are human too, vulnerable to the same thing, and maybe you are the brainwashed one, but you don't care?

Going down either of these roads ends you up with the neonazis in the long run (and yes, Russia has a lot of them too).

So no, it's not naive to point out the good points that feed the propaganda. What's naive is to think that dictators can manufacture good propaganda out of thin air anyway so it doesn't matter what "our side" is guilty of.

Putin is a gangster, not a cult leader. He's in it for himself, the people around him are in it for themselves. No one thinks he's selfless, least of all regular Russian people. It takes effort to keep something like that together. Unfortunately, he gets help from his foreign enemies.

> What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.

No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.

The point is that the propagandists don't need to base their propaganda on truth. A salient historical example here is actually World War II: the Germans tried to provoke Poland into overreacting and causing a major incident in Danzig to justify their invasion of Poland. The Poles refused to play ball, so when the appointed hour came, the Germans made up some atrocity and used it as the basis of the declaration of war, faking the evidence early in the invasion. Given that Russia has already used a similar pretext regarding Russian speakers in Ukraine, it's not a surprise that the Baltics are nervous about Russia doing the exact some thing with regards to Russian speakers in their territories.

> No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.

Oh yeah, other westerners, but not you. You take the foreign policy think tank line that Russians actually want to be balkanized. Just after saying that Putin has succeeded in brainwashing the population to go along with whatever he wants without need for excuses based on good points.

Given the ample reporting of Russian speakers in places like Odesa switching to speaking in Ukrainian as a result of the 2022 invasion to distance themselves from Russia, or the difficulty the Russian occupiers of Ukraine has had in finding people willing to work for them, or the fact that the current president of Ukraine is himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, or the fact that in the 1991 referendum, a majority of people in every Ukrainian oblast (including Crimea!) supported being a part of Ukraine rather than Russia, I don't think it's that hard to say what the general appetite of Russian-speaking Ukrainians becoming part of Russia is.

Or, to use an analogy with a different language, Putin's argument is akin to saying that a majority of Irishman want to be a part of England, because they speak English.

Don't confuse language for cultural identity.

(And, FWIW, I have fallen for this propaganda in the past; I've just been successfully educated since then as to why the simplistic linguistic map is fundamentally the wrong way to look at the conflict.)

But, similarly, don't confuse cultural identity with political one. That is really the crux of the issue here - self-identifying as Ukrainian or as Russian is very much a political question in Ukraine, and has been since their independence. This is also why you have this weird situation where several prominent Ukrainian military commanders and politicians have close direct relatives in Russia who are pro-war politicians there and who often were themselves born in Ukraine (or, conversely, the Ukrainian ones were born in Russia). So somebody may be Russian not just linguistically but culturally and ethnically as well, be born and raised in Russia, and still self-identify as Ukrainian today and speak the language solely as a marker of their chosen affiliation. And because it is a political identity in those cases, it can be very fluid - i.e. those very same people might be ones who have voted for Yanukovich 15 years ago precisely because he was seen as pro-Russian-language.

Ironically, this war will probably end up doing more to truly hammer out a single cohesive Ukrainian nation out of all the ethnic Russians in Ukraine than all the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists before it - assuming that Russia loses the war, that is.

Said brainwashing can still be more or less effective depending on how much material it can build upon.

More importantly, though, it can only be effectively applied on Russian territory, while real grievances among minority Russian populations in other countries can be exploited into fifth-columnizing them.

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