My personal account.
until 08/08/08 war i was generally pro-Western and definitely anti-Putin (seeing him as merely a continuation of Clinton/Yeltsyn/Berezovsky rule), i also was mostly ignorant of politics, internal and external, back then.
that war was a shocking revelation for me regarding west and its overwhelming supporting for ethnic cleansing.
After that i still was anti-Putin but mostly because under his rule there seems to be no generation of decent politicians who would be better than him. I was sure he destroys any competition around him. Which might even be a reasonable thing tactically, but would eventually lead to global troubles after his demise. However the idea of the Fair Civilized Future-Looking West, that was cultivated and imposed upon us all in Russia since school and forth, was shattered by explicit facts of Georgian-Osetian war handling. In general that made me tracking foreign politics but still left ignorant of domestic one.
The West's aggression against Ukraine had two effects. First it committed the understanding of the West foreign policies reality. Serbia, Iraq, Osetia, Lybia, Syria, Ukraine - they no more looked as a random set of unrelated disasters but linked into unbreakable chain of consistent and intentional Euro-American policy w.r.t. states unable to protect themselves. Second, it exposed Russian pro-west opposition as a totalitarian sect incapable of tolerating any shade of dissent, thus aggressive towards absolute majority of Russian population. Seeing their hounding of honest facts-first liberals proved pro-west opposition does not even hate people due to political views of theirs, merely sticking to facts and putting them before one's views and ideas proved enough to be blasted as "shil", "agent" and so on. Contemplating these explicit hate parties they organized time and again, even to people nominally belonging to their own liberal pro-western camp but insisting on reality checks, totally shattered any respect i could have to the said opposition. With this new baseline Putin really became "anything is head-on better than the absolute evil" figure. I still think he pays too less attention to growing a new generation of politicians to come after him. However any criticism against him, after what the Putinophobic opposition willingly displayed and relentlessly advertised these last moths, was shifted from "government is guilty of any wrongdoing" into "false until proven true beyond doubts" category.
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