The whole discourse around antislavism, which I am very active in recently, will probably undergo very heavy changes due to invasion of Russia on Ukraine, simply because of the more and more apparent reality that Russian people are also not completely innocent in this whole thing. Yeah, their government did that and their military does that (rapes women, kills children, attacks innocent people fleeing the country they said they won’t attack before etc.) on daily basis, while they are sitting and eating Russia’s Today propaganda, but a lot of people had spoken about the issue of separating Russians from Russia recently. Before it was more or less “they just live in regime and don’t know better or cannot do anything to stop it”, which is still true, but this notion also coexists with the fact that overwhelming percentage of Russians thinks that invasion on Ukraine is just. They think of Ukrainians as lesser people (which is proven by them using a derogatory term - khokhol in regard to Ukrainians) in the same way as white people commonly think about people of color. They agree with ethnic cleansing of Ukraine, simply because they have the mentality of the empire. We can blame propaganda for this, but it doesn’t make it any less horrifying or more justified. It’s just bad.
You get the idea, more here: [RussianColonialism]
Russia is very much an empire or thinks about itself as such and even people living in it, every day regular persons, have the mentality of the empire so very much deeply ingrained that without active dismantling it coming out of those people it means it will just fester and grow hidden. Now the very idea of a bad Russian in media doesn’t seem to be so far from the truth not only for the gov, but also for regular people, which I used to separate before in faith that people in Russia are smarter than their propaganda. I was wrong to trust them to be better, even though there are definitely people who are not thinking along the lines of Kreml. Sadly, there are not enough of them to change the system. Hence, the sanctions hitting all Russians: rich and poor alike, to force it, which recently seems to go into opposing way and radicalize those people even more against the West, against Ukraine and common sense, which speaks volumes about the nation itself and who they care more about: themselves. There is nothing wrong with caring about yourself and your well-being, but if your country invades another and literally kills innocent people in broad daylight and you and other people like you do not even think about overthrowing your government or rebel in any way and continue blaming the west for “being heartless and too harsh on average Russians” then you are part of the problem in here. To the victims, your inaction will basically always be as bad as your state’s action, no matter your reasons for doing nothing or your fears.
So, I will no longer include “bad Russian” stereotype in antislavism posts and discussions on my blog, because as far as I care it is not a stereotype if it is in fact true for the majority of Russians. It would be void to try to talk how unfair “bad Russian” stereotype in media is to slavic people when Russia is actively killing people as we speak and was doing so for years, but not all people were aware of the scope of the evilness of this state (I weren’t). Now it just fits that villains are from Russia as long as they weren’t the defectors, because the defector is more likely to be anti-Russian and know exactly why the regime and people living in it were bad than the average person.