Russia joined the Ukrainian civil war on the morally correct side
Which the CIA said was going to happen if NATO kept expanding back in 2009
Putin is just about the most liberal man in Russia, his politics are indistinguishable from Angela Merkel. If he was ever deposed you would find out what a real hardliner looks like. The Russian people’s biggest complaint about him is that he’s too soft and too willing to suck up to the west, and this war could have been avoided entirely if he intervened in 2014 and restored Ukraine’s democratically elected government - but he didn’t, because he and his oligarch friends so desperately want to export gas and minerals to Europe that they believed every lie that the satanically racist EU and US told them.
Here’s supporters of the neo-Nazi Russian Volunteer Corps chanting “Ukraine Above All” at the Russian opposition rally in the center of Berlin
Here’s Ilya Bogdanov, a member of the Russian Volunteer Corps who previously fought with the Right Sector and received Ukrainian citizenship in 2015
Yes, Russia has Nazis, and they fight for Ukraine
Here’s a map of votes in the 2010 presidential election. As you can see, the south and east heavily favor Viktor Yanukovych, the man who was violently and undemocratically deposed by violent far-right extremists in 2014.
Their first act on taking power was to ban Russian from being used in official documents or being taught in schools. Here’s a map of language spoken in Ukraine.
You can see why this might be a problem for a certain region. In response to the suppression of their language as well as violent ethnic cleansing, the eastern regions formed militias including sections of the AFU from that region. The Kiev regime then declared these militias defending their homes to be ‘terrorists’ and began the ‘anti-terror operations’ in which fascist paramilitaries repeatedly assaulted the Russian speaking regions, fighting the eastern militias and terrorizing Russian-speaking civilians (who, it must be stressed, were still citizens of Ukraine).
Then you’re stupid or propagandized or both. The destruction of the USSR was one of the worst tragedies in history and every part of the eastern bloc suffered catastrophically because of it, with many regions having millions upon millions of excess deaths in the 90s due to the obliteration of their economies by western vulture capitalists.
In Russia, the situation only stabilized once Putin closed Russia’s open veins and offered the west a more reasonable quantity of Russian blood at a time, in exchange for getting to take part in global imperialism. Thankfully the EU and US were too fucking greedy and racist to consider Russians human, so Putin has been forced into an anti-imperialist position despite his best efforts to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine for EIGHT YEARS.
And it was STILL only when the Ukrainians kept violently bombing Donetsk and Luhansk in violation of the ceasefire that he finally got a fucking clue and sent some troops to stop the genocide once and for all.
HAHAHAHAHAHA, I am a COMMUNIST, I hate liberals and Putin categorically is one. He is a true believer in neoliberal economics, a true believer in the free market, and he could have blended seamlessly into any EU summit (and desperately, desperately tried to) if the Euros weren’t so filled with Hitlerite racism against Russians - and their imperial master, the US, didn’t demand to be the only one selling them gas. And enforce that demand with a certain bomb on a certain pipeline.