Maybe Putin is fighting the deep state?

RatherBeBrewing said:

HoustonHusky said:

Putin is an Asperger’s case with little human emotion and that will do anything to help Russia.

The fallacy of the @hhusky morons of the world is that just because Putin is not a good guy it does not make anybody he is fighting magically good. Ukraine is a corrupt shithole that yes does have a subset that love them some Nazis and yes interfered heavily in the 2016 election. They picked the Dems in hopes of getting even more $$$ (laundered and real) and becoming part of NATO, and in doing so listened to Dems about poking the bear and from that destroyed their country and killed tens of thousands of their people.

Should be a lesson for the idiots of the world but they are too dumb to learn it.

I’m a pretty harsh critic of Ukraine, since independence they’ve shot themselves in the foot more often than Wile E. Coyote - but you’re also parroting half-truths or exaggerations that have come from the firehouse of misinformation.

Too pointless to look at everything, but the part about the Nazis I don’t get. First off all, what does that mean? How large do you think this subset is? Can someone explain this to me? Feel free to skip the bulk of it and go to the bold at the end.

All of Eastern Europe is right wing to some extent - I’ve been to all EE countries other than a few post Yugoslav ones and to say that Ukraine is more “Nazi-ish” than any of them is patently false. A falsehood that Russia ran with when Ukraine was having a revolution over their Kremlin backed president changing his guarantee to not join Russia’s “Customs Union” with Belarus and Kazakhstan that was mild USSR 2.0. There were a lot of Ukrainian nationalists, supporters of a guy named Stepan Bandera, too complicated to explain. And then the Azov battalion was praised and still exists prominently, since (shockingly) a neo-Nazi-ish paramilitary group was better prepared to fight off Russian soldiers than a derelict army that was looted by corrupt politicians and infiltrated by the Russians. They are a PR nightmare but the people in that region (Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast) made Azov into heroes after they were crucial in stopping the Russian onslaught of pillage and rape in 2014.

Ukrainians are mystified how the hell Americans are believing the Nazi stuff is of significance. Other than its the narrative the Kremlin force feeds their own people, and that like a 1000 guys joined by some Swedes and Americans in the shittiest part of an already shitty country have a very Neo Nazi flavor. Jewish president, Jewish prime minister, political freedom and freedom of speech that their neighbors have never had - overall a society that is much more free than it has ever been.

Meanwhile, Russia has a dictator going on his 23rd year in power with a managed cult of personality. Where he’s shut down the tiny bit of independent media he had left, promotes violent nationalism, has invaded multiple neighbors in hopes of protecting “people of his superior ethnicity” and violated multiple agreements along the way to right his perceived historical wrongs, has written historically inaccurate essays that are mandatory reading about the greatness of his people and the need to take over lesser nations. How is it that the narrative is “this Putin guy is clearly pretty evil, but I hear they have some Nazis in Ukraine so let’s keep that in mind” when Russia is trying as hard as it possibly can to be the Nazis? How does that make sense? Can someone tell me? I want to be able to explain the thought process if asked.