You're in fact-free denial. When Russia started the war in Donbass in 2014 Ukrainian Jews had two targets on their backs:
1. Ukrainian Right Sector neo-Nazis' propaganda about the "Muscovite Jewish mafia" and Russians in Donetsk handing out leaflets in front of synagogues calling for the registration of all Jewish assets.
Orban's Soros-bashing and Trump's rhetoric about "globalists" is certainly anti-semitic.
Remember the AfD sympathizer's attack on the synagogue in Halle? The murderous Trumpster shooting at The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh? Arab islamo-theocratic fascists "every synagogue is an Israeli embassy" slogan in London and Geneva and assaults on Jews in the UK, Canada, the US, France, the Netherlands? Your prejudice is defined by what you choose not to see. Soros-bashing is the newest version of an old anti-semitic trope: Jews are both predatory bankers and communists. Now, if I could just find my Rothschild space laser to zap this....
Latvian Legionnaires: I took my students and printouts of Generalplan Ost to their annual march precisely because I wasn't fine with it and to expose the myth of their fighting for Latvian independence for the delusion it is.
My Volgagrad-born schoolteacher sister in law and my Polish mother in law in Ventspils don't feel like second class citizens. Same for her two sons. Latvian government language policy does have its statist idiotic parts, which I've already written about (https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/polyglot-meets-linguistic-political-football-in-latvia-90a41e8a7ced).
But it's less intrusive than Quebec's. If language policy makes Ukraine a pariah state and my ethnic Russian relatives in Latvia second class citizens, Quebec is even more so.
The ethnic Russian Estonians in the EU city of Narva wouldn't consider trading their lives in Narva for the closed, impoverished Ivangorod for half a second. If you had a choice between living in Ivangorod and Narva, I know which you'd choose. Don't lie; it wouldn't be Mother Russia, but the EU side of the river, especially after having lived through the wreck of Brexit.
Russian nationalists suffer from the same kind of collective narcissistic personality disorder as America-first Trumpsters: they see in others and project onto them exactly who they are.
You see Nazis everywhere else but within a Russia whose best-selling books and comic books include Tovarich Fuhrer: https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1535582101621420032.
You see the voluntary defensive alliance of NATO, with recent soon to be VOLUNTARY new members Finland and Sweden, and the US as colonizers, Putin said Europe is colonized by its "suzerain across the Atlantic"; when the transatlantic hegemon couldn't convince its allies to spend even 2% of GDP on defense until Putin launched his war.
The real colonizer: a Russia that's a resource-extracting land-based colonial empire built over five centuries of genocidal conquest with its own racist pecking order (Tuvans, Buryats, Tatars and other non-white, non-Orthodox indigenous peoples at the bottom). At least in North America most of us have known since the 1970 movie Little Big Man and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that the country was built on genocidal land theft.
Russia is a neo-confederate Trumpster wet dream; a gigantic white supremacist, homophobic Republican red state with no church-state separation. No wonder Trumpsters at the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) organized by neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes were chanting Putin! Putin! Putin! and RT loves Tucker Carlson and fascist Fox's rage monetisation machine.
You see genocide against Russians in Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine while ignoring your own genocidal erasure of Ukrainians into "Little Russians", whether Ukrainians agree or not. The result: the fictional fantasy that Ukraine leveled Mariiupol and Severodonetsk and committed the massacres at Bucha and Irpin. This story of a Ukrainian family that lived for weeks in a cellar with Russian soldiers is no fiction: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-prisoners-in-a-cellar-in-the-ukrainian-village-of-novyi-bykiv
You see fascism everywhere, but in Putin's promotion of the openly fascist Ilya Ilyin and the influence of the Eurasian fascist Dugin and the genocidal rants of Solovyov, Medvedev and Sergeytsev.
You see Nazism in a Jewish president Zelenskiy elected with 73% of the vote while far right parties in Ukraine got 2%. In the US, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Sweden, the far right gets more votes.
Like the January 6 insurrectionary Trumpster traitors, you see authoritarianism everywhere but in the mirror. Russia has had the same president for 22 years. No democracy has the same president for that long.
Why did Meduza and TV Rain have to decamp to Riga?
Why was Memorial shut down? Why 15 year jail sentences for those who call the war a war? Why a protestor holding up a blank sign arrested?
Why did hundreds of thousands of Russian tech and professional talent, like my apolitical gamedev friend in St Petersburg, leave Russia when the war started? The Russia of White Nights Gaming I went to and Moscow startup incubator Skolkovo, is as dead as my late acquaintance who ran it for Vekselberg, Lawrence Wright. We were naive and deluded that somehow innovation could grow within a kleptocratic mafia with a flag. "Alex Stone" was less naive and had the good sense to move to the UK 20 years ago.
To find authoritarian fascism, genocidal colonization, and Nazism look in the mirror.
To find more democracy than Russia has ever had, look to bottom-up Ukraine, like my former entrepreneurship student, Anna Bondarenko, who worked at the Odesa startup incubator Impacthub, and now organizes "the other Ukrainian army"; thousands of civil society volunteers in Odesa: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/ukraine-volunteer-army-russia-odesa/671088/.
Not the "Mala Rossiya", Little Russia, of Russian nationalist fantasy, but the direct descendants of Nestor Makhno's anti-Bolshevik anarchist insurgency, the only faction in the Russian Civil War that never killed Jews (testimony from my paternal grandma from Vinnitsya who lived through it).
The war has accelerated democracy in Ukraine, as is clear from this Atlantic article: (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russian-invasion-ukraine-democracy-changes/661451/):
"In a recent trip to a village near Ukraine’s border with Russia, during a break between the seemingly constant explosions and skirmishes taking place nearby, a teenage Ukrainian soldier told me of how he did not want to live under a leader like Vladimir Putin, someone “who believes he may tell others what they should do.” Another volunteer fighter, a former Thai-boxing coach, chimed in that whereas Russia offered only “stagnation,” Ukraine was “a place where things are developing with the influence of the people.” In a neighboring area, a former appliance repairman recounted to me his disbelief that Russian soldiers would invade “and kill innocent people, as if they have no choice.” He would prefer to go to prison, he said.
As a Kyiv-based journalist working for Ukrainian and international media, I am very much a representative of the professional class, what many may call my country’s “liberal elite.” My circle of friends and I discuss democracy, accountability, and the rule of law, but we long believed we were a minority in Ukraine, that the majority of our compatriots did not care about these abstract terms. Yet in reporting on Putin’s invasion, in traveling through my country, I have heard fellow Ukrainians, without any prompting, explain these enormous concepts better than many academics.
I listened as those frontline fighters spoke of the freedom to choose who governed them and change course if need be, and the freedom to chart one’s own path in life. I heard a mayor say that his town near the Russian border was defending civilization and fighting on behalf of a world where laws mattered. A window installer in Odesa, on the Black Sea coast, told me he had learned how to fire a gun to ensure that he did not have to “live in a country where Moscow tells me whom to elect.”
This started happening so often—in bombed-out villages as well as bustling cities—that I began to understand that something deeper was under way. I watched as Ukrainians articulated their values and, more and more, I started paying attention to how they exercised them, how they interacted with the state, and how representatives of the state interacted with them.
Ordinary people have been confronted with autocracy and opted against it. They have not simply taken up arms, but made demands of their leaders. Officials have addressed citizens’ needs and requests with creative and responsive government. Activists I spoke with would complain about their elected representatives but still worked with them, reaching compromises and finding solutions. With the central government in Kyiv often overloaded and under-resourced, local administrators, mayors, and governors have had to band together and devise their own solutions.
Over time, I saw that the war hadn’t just forced us to defend our land and our freedom; it has accelerated our progress as a democracy. Ukraine was far from perfect when the war began—we struggled with corruption, mismanagement, and centralization of power. In responding to Putin’s invasion, however, we have become more democratic, more decentralized, more liberal. The Russian leader’s efforts are not merely failing in the narrow sense; they have highlighted how different we really are from Russia, and are having the opposite effect from what he intended."
