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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

> The Ukraine crisis starts and suddenly Russians turn out to be massive homophobes, huh?

Suddenly? They'd been widely criticized for their new homophobic laws well before the Ukraine crisis.

Also, the US torturing people doesn't make other atrocities okay. I keep hearing countries and their fanboys say "yeah, but that other country also does bad things", or "but China is even worse!" Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's okay for your country to do the same. It means that the other country should stop. Can we stop making this a race to the bottom?

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> They'd been widely criticized for their new homophobic laws well before the Ukraine crisis.

I'm not so sure about that.

> Also, the US torturing people doesn't make other atrocities okay. I keep hearing countries and their fanboys say "yeah, but that other country also does bad things", or "but China is even worse!" Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's okay for your country to do the same.

I'm equally against all "countries" (=governments, in practice). You may have noticed they all do bad things, either currently or eventually.

> I'm not so sure about that.

It's easy to verify by looking up some dates. The law against homosexual propaganda stems from June 2013, and has been widely criticized ever since, including calls to boycott the Winter Olympics at Sochi, in February 2014. The protests that led to the Euromaidan revolution started in November 2013, the actual revolution took place in February 2014, and was soon followed by Russian intervention.

If you didn't start to pay attention to Russia until after the crisis started, I can imagine you might think the homophobia criticism came only after the crisis, but it actually started half a year earlier.

There's been such a massive propaganda campaign over Ukraine that it's difficult to verify anything.

But what we do know is that it's all a geopolitical power struggle. The US wants Kiev under its control, but that control has been slipping.

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