[asats]

I appreciate you not wanting to demonize russia, but it looks to me like you just don't understand the situation on the ground. Getting your "other point of view" about russia from sputnik and RT is not the way to go. I agree that the american hysteria is probably mostly unfounded, but the situation in Russia itself is pretty dire.

Russian duma is rubber-stamping insane restrictive laws literally every month, to the point that people have been calling it "a crazy printer". You can get arrested for posting memes on facebook or standing by yourself with an A4 piece of paper with a political message. The courts are corrupt and have a 99.8% conviction rate. Almost all real opposition is barred from participating in any elections through very restrictive requirements plus random denials that they cannot dispute because the court system is corrupt/broken. Opposition/journalist offices get raided monthly by the police that confiscate all of their electronics. Now people are getting shot and poisoned with increasing frequency. It's a real fucking dystopia here after 20 years of unchecked rule by a single guy and it's getting worse, fast.

I don't really care for Navalny aside from his willingness to stand up to all of that. All of his movements, accounts, connections, everything has been monitored by the government for over a decade. That's not a conspiracy, Putin himself confirms it all. If he had any dirt on him, it'd all be public and he'd be in jail for treason a looong time ago. An entire FSB team of 8 people has been tailing him for over three years, again, confirmed by Putin. Yet all they throw at him is that he's an "irrelevant blogger".

Also bots are not a meme, that's a thing. I don't know anything about the american election interference, but IRA office in Olgino has been a thing for almost a decade, Novaya Gazeta reported on them in 2013 (Six of their journalists have been murdered in the last couple decades btw). The people working in those buildings are not bots, but actual people getting paid to post pro government things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Saint...