I used to lurk on r/AskRussia, and in the run up to the invasion most of the Russians there (who may or may not be representative of Russians in general, I dunno) were confidently saying that there was no way Russia was going to invade Ukraine, it was unthinkable they'd do that to their brothers and neighbours, and it was just Western propaganda. When the invasion happened they were in complete shock, you could tell that many of them felt completely ashamed of their government, at the lies, and that they'd believed them.
As an ethnic russian living in Germany this was exactly the way I felt. But afaik this sadly does not reflect the general russian population. I think people have always less problems to accept more lies than to accept that they have been fooled.
We all need to remember online spaces like reddit generally lean younger and more liberal. We never really get a holistic view of any situation. Just as people on reddit would say "we didn't want trump" and the response was "clearly over half of you did" from europeans, this is another example of how we have to realize we are in our own little bubble in these online communities.
That's somewhat debatable, though, considering Trump won by electoral votes but lost the popular vote by about 2%. The percentage of votes cast by eligible voters was also only something like 57-60%, so it's more like 27.5% of eligible voters directly voted for Trump (if I calculated that correctly).
Except at the time it was a shock to most people. The consensus before the invasion was that Russia was just posturing. But then they went for it.
This article from Jun. 2022 states Ukraine hoped they could descalte with sanctions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/11/biden-zelensky-russia-invasion-warnings-putin/
This article from Aug. 2022 states Ukraine knew it was going to happen but they down played it to prevent a financial crisis: https://www.newsweek.com/zelensky-reveals-why-he-didnt-warn-his-citizens-russian-invasion-1734268
I'm not sure if both are versions of the truth, where they were hoping to descalte and prevent a financial crisis. I'm sure either way they were hoping it wouldn't happen.
At the time I recall saying “they bought a hell of a lot of flowers to not hold the wedding.”
Americans always seem to think that there is some kind of pan-ethinc bond between people in completely different counties, as if we weren't all killing each other until that whole "world wars" thing.
For a lot of us, Russia and Ukraine were literally parts of the same country when we were growing up, and we used the terms Russia and the USSR pretty much interchangeably. I wasn't aware until pretty recently that places like Baikonur, Minsk, and Chernobyl are not in Russia. Actual misdeeds committed by Russia in the Soviet era were described in vague terms and were very hard to separate from exaggerated fear mongering about communism, so I ended up knowing very little about that era. Even big things like the Holomodor were just not part of the public consciousness.
So yeah, we were very ignorant of the situation, and in many of our minds Ukraine may as well have been southwestern Russia. But those of us who aren't idiots do at least know that the possibility of going to war with a neighboring country is inherent in the existence of separate countries, and we know from our own civil war that people of the same or similar ethnicities will absolutely go to war with each other.
That's what happens when you sacrifice your cultural identity for "white American".
For people in America who aren’t racialized it’s hard to maintain a separate cultural identity after a few generations. You wind up with a few trinkets of the culture your family came from if you don’t wind up so thoroughly blended it’s impossible to care. Like my grandpa was an immigrant and while that culture is important to me I make no mistake that if I went back to his home country I’d just be some stupid American who barely even speaks the language. What did I get from his culture? Some comfort foods, a handful of holiday traditions, and the branch of Christianity I was raised in.
And the cultures that try to have their cake and eat it too like Irish-American and Italian-American are looked at as weirdos by the countries they came from.
This tweet was cottage cheese when it was posted.
Russians have a slur specifically for Ukrainians. They couldn't even tell half of the countries in Europe. But they'll go out of their way to go after Ukraine.
When will tankies learn that there's no brotherhood amongst facsists... It's like "Thanks for killing the dissenters, now back in the salt mines!"
At the same time that they always learn, when the leopards are feasting on their faces. Sometimes, not even then, honestly.
They call them "Pickmes", but personally I prefer the term "Ernst Rohms", it puts into historical context how this kind of thing tends to go.....
For those who don't know - Ernst Rohm was a gay Nazi who was considered to be one of Hitler's closest friends. He believed he would be spared even as the Nazis were gathering up homosexuals and burning research centers, because Hitler was his homie ya see.
To make a long story short he was gassed to death in a concentration camp....
If the tankies were less stupid, they wouldn't be tankies.
And he posted it 7 years after the invasion started.
We need more of this sort of dreading up of the recent past. I remember this was not an uncommon statement at the time, but all of a sudden its like everyone is trying to gaslight us into a different past.
They obviously never learned the three things in life you don't fuck with:
- Mother Nature
- Mother-in-laws
- Motherfucking Ukrainians
(The Italian job)
Always bugged the shit out of me that he actually says "mother freaking" in that scene
Completely ruined my suspension of disbelief and I still cringe when remembering it.
I feel like it was overdubbed to get to PG-13 rating. His lips don't line up with it, and it sounds off.
IIRC this is only in the pg13 version. I'm almost sure I saw the original one.
This reads like one of those simpbears seeking to be relevant on lemmy lately, the whiff of perceived superiority, the condescending dribble, strangely similar..
Dude, they're just not that into you.
Well, from what I can tell there might be a bit of a logic error in here as well. Unless the person is assuming Ukraine considers Russia a brother but Russia doesn't think of Ukraine as a brother?
This is my favorite thing today.
Account Suspended 😬
I'm pretty sure Russia never understood the cultural link between Russians & Ukr.
