Thank you for the good convo as well!

I’m just pondering the idea of if Russia just have their government magically replaced with someone else’s, would the culture you say persist for more than a decade.

I maybe wouldn’t phrase in that way, but I do agree that russians are capable of change. There is nothing inherent or unchangeable about their chauvinism.

I think their current situation (authoritarianism, broad support for genocidal imperialism) is a product of their own choices, not some sort of essential chauvinistic quality of russians.

But to get to a state where they can replace their government, they need to be frank about the root causes of their predicament.

They have to clearly and openly condemn imperialism (including their actions in Chechnya).

They have to recognize that the root cause of putin’s rule is not some external scapegoat. It is the russian people. They elected him in 2000 (widely considered a more or less free election). They elected him again 2004 even after he shut down all independent TV stations. They went with comical medvedev seat warming exercise in 2008, there was no pushback against their invasion of Georgia. They again allowed to him to come to power in 2012 and there was no pushback to the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

You can’t both claim that the elections are illegitimate, while also partaking in them and calling to vote for openly chauvinist parties that are well know to be directly managed by the Kremlin as fake opposition.

But instead we get some fake platitude about how putin does not reflect the russian people and “What is the EU’s strategy on russia?”

I don’t see any real desire to take actions that would allow russians to nurture their own position on things. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is.