[nojonestownpls]

It's interesting to contrast comments like this in this thread, with the amount of hatred and abuse heaped upon Russians on the day of Russia's invasion - not just the Russian state, but a big chunk of comments that made it clear that they held all Russians responsible for it and would like to see their lives destroyed. And had relatively little pushback against them.

I agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, but I wish that thought applied in general, and not just to some special case countries. Especially considering the widely differing levels of democratic power people have in these different countries.

[9dev]

The Russian war on Ukraine is a WILDLY different case. There was no border dispute of any kind between these countries, no terror, no threats, just the Russian desire to own Ukraine.

Your point is pretty moot.

[nojonestownpls]

> There was no border dispute of any kind between these countries

That is such a perfect representation of the level of public discourse around this, that I can only thank you for providing a sample. It's not even hard to learn about the Donetsk region's conflicts and the destruction there long before the invasion, but flooding the media and Internet with convenient narratives like "just the Russian desire to own Ukraine" has worked and continues to work very effectively on the general public (likely even more than the censorship does).

And all of this is quite orthogonal to the main fact here, which is that it makes very little sense to blame the population living under an authoritarian government and want them destroyed for that government's actions, and then turn around and give people in a democratic country a pass on their government's actions.

[mopsi]

> It's not even hard to learn about the Donetsk region's conflicts and the destruction there long before the invasion, but flooding the media and Internet with convenient narratives like "just the Russian desire to own Ukraine" has worked and continues to work very effectively on the general public (likely even more than the censorship does).

There was none. The conflict in Donetsk was entirely manufactured during the initial stages of the 2014 invasion. When the European Court of Human Rights reviewed a case concerning the downed Malaysian airliner, the Russian side argued that Russia was not involved, claiming that it was the work of "Donetsk rebels". The court found that there was no genuine separatist movement and no rebels of any kind, only unmarked troops operating under direct Russian control from the start.

If anything, the media has been flooded with misrepresentations that promote a "generic ethnic conflict" narrative to mask a straightforward and unprovoked invasion of one country by another country. And the reasons indeed do boil down to one single person, his unchecked power, and unhealthy obsessions - as has been the case with many dictators throughout the history.