They constantly over-represent ethnic minorities Muslims, Mongols on TV, etc. And you need to Remember, Mariupol was 44% Russian and they bombed 15 000 - 20 000 civs to death, so half of them are Russians, they don't give a fuck! They just have "their people" of any background who serve them for the money and no one else, the concept of association is very unrealistic when it comes to hard choices, a couple of years ago, they said that a Chechen fighting in Syria for Putin is much more Russian than a Russian living in Moscow, watching Netflix and not loving Putin, this is their doctrine

the Russian elite is quite multinational, there are a lot of Ukrainians in the upper echelons of power, they just want "their Ukraine" like in the good old days. Very similar to the Algerian war. Russia is a very anti-communist AND anti-fascist today, you can't imagine how much is cringe, when I read these comments from the west, it's very ironic because people in the west have a lot more welfare state AND more nationalists in the parliament!

It’s somehow very binary in people’s heads, the world is full of hybrid regimes, for example, theocratic states in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.Putin is trying to build a neo-tsarist Russia, this is not fascism, this is just very personalistic multinational imperialism, not ideological, when he leaves, this design will suffer a huge crisis.

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For example this huge city on the picture is 20-30% ethnically Russian and they just drop 500kg bombs to residential areas, it tells you a lot about the situation. Many modern Russian writers I often listen, they say that this is practically a civil war inside Russia, an Archaic against progressivism, similar to the cold civil war in the US now, but bloody and exported as a war of Russians against Ukrainians.

also most of the conservatives here in Russia see Ukrainians as just rebellious Russians and they don't even see the difference between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in Mixed Cities like Muriupol and Kharkiv and bomb them anyway.
Also, Ukrainian natinalist fraction want to see this war as purelu 100% ethnic Ukrainians against 100% ethnic Russians war, because it has a huge benefit for national mobilization "us vs them", I don’t blame them, they stay on defence right now, but this is not very detailed look on this war.