If you want Russians to overthrow Putin, act like it
On opposing Russia and having empathy for Russians.
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I cut Ukrainian Twitter a lot of slack, considering [gestures around in every direction]. That said, when you make this guy momentarily look like the voice of reason, it might be time to log off for a while:
I tweeted my own question, which has not yet been answered. I’ll let you know if that changes.
Russia’s crimes against Ukraine have dominated my Twitter timeline since I foolishly rejoined a few months ago, but the question of what we do with Russians fleeing the country has been the B plot. I think any fighting-age Russian bugging out instead of being press-ganged into a war and very possibly being forced to carry out crimes against humanity is a very, very good thing that should be encouraged.
Others feel very differently, and it’s probably no accident that this feeling intensifies the closer your country is located to the Russian border. If my country had just gotten its independence from the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in 1991 and was still being harassed if not outright invaded by Russia in 2022, yeah, I’m probably going to have some words about more of them showing up on my doorstep. I can’t truly appreciate how Ukrainians and Latvians and Poles feel from an ocean away.
Of course, that goes both ways. The further away you are, the better able you are to look at the situation without the kind of deep emotional investment that can lead even decent people to do terrible things.
That’s why, when I’m caught up in a Twitter thread with Eastern Europeans sneering about how Russians’ failure to protest and revolt en masse “proves” they all support Putin and the war, I find myself compelled to ask what they were doing from the end of the Second World War to the glasnost era.
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