Hey, I’ll pre-emptively apologise for the length of this post, as the topic is complex. Propaganda, nationalism, etc… in Eastern Europe isn’t a trivial topic, and I will tack on specific concerns with supporting Russia in general.

I think a large component that is missing here is the understanding of how propaganda in that region of the world works. Eastern Europeans in general had been warning about increased Russian aggression for more than a decade, and that it would come as “defense of Russian people”.

Hexbear users, I’ve been told by members of your community, are overwhelming Americans first and foremost, and you might be the exception, these users are not used to the methodology of the propaganda used here. Your corporate/capitalist propaganda works on fear (like the red scare, they’re coming for your bathrooms, etc…), but the type of propaganda we have is best explained as “tell so many lies at once, the truth can’t be discerned anymore”. There is a reason why Eastern Europe has banned Russian media harder than any Western European country has, it’s due to the history and experiences they have endured.

What I do think is a problem is how hexbear’s own announcement post w.r.t federation talks specifically how Ukraine’s government is at war with its people. But overwhelmingly its people support the current government, this is from my travels to those regions (yes anecdotal) and talking to people, but also from polls. They of course want an end to the war, but they want to rule themselves, not be ruled by Russians. Putin’s war declaration speech that I watched specifically refers to Ukrainian identity not existing, that they are Russians. That Ukraine existing was Lenin’s mistake. For Putin this isn’t a war only with the government, but much more. So talking about this being a war waged by Ukraine’s government on its people muddies the situation, I’ll refer back to the way propaganda works in the East as “many lies to hide the truth”, this one falls under that (in my opinion).

That post also talks about how Russia is there to protect Donbas people, which to me is an easy explanation after the fact as their first action wasn’t to protect people, but to take over the region around their military base. Crimea was annexed months beforehand. This already makes Russia inherintly a biased participant and so what they say should be highly scrutinized. No country would admit they started a conflict unjustly or for self-interest, it’s never happened in history, and the propaganda mill starts before a war starts. Russian media never talked about Ukrainian Nazism until it became advantageous to them. In fact they are currently giving sanctuary to the president who declared Banderas a national hero, Yanukovich, the one ousted by the revolution.

Lastly, this is a personal opinion that I can’t stray from, I’m a firm believer no country with Russia’s practices towards lgbtqia+ should receive “critical support” as some of your community members refer to it. This is because I would never give Taliban critical support either, even if they root out horror practices (like the raping of young children), this is because even if they are successful, the result is still oppression and suffering, just maybe a different target. That’s not solving the problem, but prolonging it. I didn’t support the US in their unjust invasion of Iraq either, their goals were never to improve the citizen’s lives, I refer back to Putin’s war declaration here.

Furthermore giving critical support is dangerous. Russia’s nationalism is a huge problem for their border countries. I fear, if anything, Putin is containing the problem and in 10 years, when he’s gone, we might face worse. Already their state media’s talking heads talk about pre-emptive nuking places, taking over the Baltic, etc… I do fear your critical support is giving undue space to a country who has fairly large ambitions to turn into “Greater Russia” once again, as former prime minister Medveded has happily posted about.

I do want to close by saying there is a Nazism and nationalism problem in Eastern Europe (West as well, but let’s keep the focus on the topic at hand). This includes Ukraine and Russia. I won’t make arguments against that. But I firmly believe that Russia’s goal isn’t to tackle that. Or rather that if people believe that, then Iraq’s war was about weapons of mass destruction (it clearly wasn’t, and even teenage me in Europe never believed that). I’ll redirect to my earlier paragraph where I say “no country will ever admit they started an unjust selfish war”. It’s actually quite rare in history a war is started in defense of something just, but many wars are claimed in just that name.