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Russians accused of carving swastikas on captured Ukrainians
(www.firstpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I just want to draw an important distinction between the Russian government, military leadership, & voluntary/willing soldiery and the average Russian citizen. It would be wrong to call the latter "the bad guys", but not the former.
Thank you.
Russian here, protested against the war and find it terrifying, not buying official narratives of nazis and NATO threat for a second.
Still remember the 24th of February, 2022. Before the date, we were all like "naive Westerners, Russia will not openly attack Ukraine, that's so obviously stupid on so many levels, it's a brotherly nation going through turbulent times, that's it". No one could in their sane mind even comprehend something like this. It was unthinkable. No one wanted that aside from a few select extremists, and most people never supported it later on - though propaganda machine did make some progress on the weakest of minds.
And then we wake up that day, on 24th of February, and have a collective "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK PUTIN WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THAT OH WE'RE ALL SO SCREWED". It was a very grim day, and everyone had worries of their own: some, like me, had friends and family in Ukraine, some were afraid of their men being drafted (which did eventually happen in September 2022), others were just terrified of the scale of human suffering it will entail.
Since then, we learned never to trust anything and question everything we believe in. It was a cultural shock like Russia has never seen.
Same day, 24th of February, streets sparked in violent protests, police got extremely brutal - to this day, almost 2 years into the war, police has constant 24/7 presence in the places that were the main anti-war protest venues of my city. It lasted for months, despite police never stopping and detaining extreme numbers of people: courts are still overburdened processing all of them. All until everyone who had integrity and bravery and nothing to lose got in jail.
Putin should pay for all the atrocities he has committed, and that's something very many Russians will subscribe to.
As a Lithuanian, I actually disagree. We always knew that a day like February 24 would come. We kept telling that to our allies and they thought we were being paranoid.
You have to address the deep sense of Russian imperialism before we can take you seriously. Even the Russians who have lived in my country for 30 years or more have it. "We are Russians" they say. "We want the world; we want it and we won't stop until we have all of it."
I also know that people like you exist, and some people resisted, but our collective fear is that people like you are a smaller minority than you would think.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Lithuania is often considered very anti-Russia, similar to other Baltic states, as attributed to a history of Soviet occupation and all the outcomes of it, so it's natural that alarms raised by such country are more easily dismissed. At some point, this really could be paranoia; at another, it stopped being one. The art is in figuring out where one ends and the other begins.
As per imperialism - it is common in almost every country with big territory, population, large economy and military. US (above all), China and other powers have it too. I'm not saying it's not ugly, I'm just pointing out it's a general trend that should be approached more systemically - and until then, cultural shifts can only get us so far. I wonder what would it take to remove imperialist tendencies in every place in the world.
We are not anti-Russia, we are simply pro-survival. Even before the Soviet occupation, tsarist Russia did a lot to destroy our national identities, in Lithuania, they forbade writing our language in Roman alphabet and hunted smugglers that carried books written in it. The ban and other repressions caused several massive rebellions including 1830s and 1860s ones.
The Tsar later sent his hound, Muravjov, who hanged so many men that the line of gallows went from Kaunas to Vilnius (~90 km). They have put a statue of Muravjov outside of Lithuanian consulate in Kaliningrad. I guess they are going to put a statue of Adolf Hitler outside the Israeli consulate next /s
And imperialism is common among big countries, sure, but it is Russians who enflame their local minorities in neighbouring countries and then rush to save them. And we do have a Russian minority.
My point is, due to all this complicated and violent history, Lithuania will obviously be on a higher alert than many other countries - that's what I'm saying first and foremost. This means a lot of false alarms, which the rest of the world recognizes, and which is why those early warnings didn't help.
But thanks for making your point, it is important to the understanding of the problem as well.
Genuine question - could you provide examples of open high-level hostilities Russia has shown to Baltic or other countries related to Russian minorities? Cause from the inside it looks mostly as showing concern over Russians having their culture stripped away in order to force assimilation. Don't know much on how it's going in Lithuania in particular, but I have ethnic Russian relatives in Latvia and many of the restrictions imposed, language and cultural, seem very unreasonable and hostile.
Russian hostilities are not open until they are.
Belarus sent a lot of immigrants from 3rd countries to Baltic states and Poland to cause problems for us.
Russian propaganda machine was to blame for enflaming a lot of marginal political movements, like antivax, anti-LGBT and now anti-Ukraine.
Russian backed propaganda machines were cutting up Baltic states and inventing non-existant separatist movements since 2010. But unlike in Ukraine, none of them stuck.
The problem with Russians in the Baltics is how many of them still think that they are either in charge or that Russian army will be back soon. They completely refuse to integrate, refuse to learn our language, our customs, our values, despite living here for over 50 years. In comparison , I spent 9 months in Sweden, I can give directions and haggle in the market in Swedish.
I see your point.
I wonder, though, how many of this is genuine and how much is false politically motivated accusations, which are very often the case in the political landscape of many countries.
Being to blame and being the cause are two very different things.
Also, you know the world is fucked up when immigrants can be used as a weapon. We seriously need to deal with the problem, and not through stricter border control and enforcement. But I digress.
I get your integration argument, though.
We will never know how large the extent of Russian propaganda and other intelligence activities are, but whenever we have any problems in our country there are always chaos actors linked to Russia. They are always on the lookout for weakness to exploit. Even a local anti-fracking protest had ties to Gazprom.
Toppling the Russian government is the key to end the horrific war and genocide. The "Republics" in Russia should have been independent.
The whole "but every country is imperialist" is kinda weird to say, dude, considering Russia is the only one atm currently involved in an invasion
I'm not saying this to distract someone; I'm pointing it out to say that the solution to imperialism lies in some sort of global shift and not local cultural effort. Cultures of superpowers will inevitably gravitate towards imperialism, and we need to find a way to stop it at its root.
Honestly, discussing Russia's economy as large in the same breath as the US and China is a bit disingenuous. US GDP is around 27 trillion USD, China around 18 trillion USD. Russia? 2 trillion USD.
Source for figures: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/explainers/top-10-largest-economies-in-the-world/86159/1. Even if we dispute the specific numbers, an order of magnitude is an order of magnitude.
Edit: typo
That's true, and that's why I selected several criteria here. For its relatively low economic power, Russia has tremendous influence in the region and does act as a superpower due to a large combination of factors.