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Apparently, there is a viral video in Russia of a long discussion between a oppositional blogger and a pro-putin actor. I can only find a German news article on it, but I would love to see the whole interview (subtitled). However, I doubt such a video exists. For me, it is more the lack of effort by western media to gain insight into the thoughts of actual russians than the positions itself that I find astonishing and relevant to the culture war.
Both sides (pro-neutrality right and pro-ukraine left) have no interest whatsover to shed a light on the internal discussions in Russia.
Edit: The video exists on youtube, linked in a comment below. I feel dumb and incompetent now.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/russland-gespraech-zwischen-putinisten-und-regierungskritiker-18626426.html
"The West is waging war against us"
I have a simplified model of Russia. Imperial ambitions and territorial expansion is deeply embedded in their psyche. They never lost their colonial possession like the rest of Europe. Russian desires to dominate their neighbors is as deeply embedded as Americans clinging to their amendments. It’s what makes them feel Russian to be the top dog of their neighborhood.
Hence this is the war to end that with a humiliating defeat.
Centuries ago one people dominating the region may have been necessary due to the mongol/hun/etc, occasional European invasion threat due to geography. And hence Russia spent centuries fighting territorial expansion wars.
Losing over 20 million in WW2 is going to induce some intense paranoia about foreign threats. Russia lost 12% of its population in WW2, Belarus lost 25%! Ukraine was in the middle with 16%.
The UK lost 1% in WW2, 2% in WW1. The US lost 0.32% of its population, a rounding error. The horrors of the Somme, all the anti-war poetry and so on in our entire Anglosphere cultural canon... it stems from casualties that are negligible compared to those on the Eastern Front. We have not experienced anything like that.
We're dealing with a country that is still traumatized in ways we cannot truly understand, a country with a very large nuclear arsenal. WW2 was formative to Russia's leaders - Putin lost his brother in the siege of Leningrad. The impact on Russian culture is significant, to say the least.
If we think of colonies in a kind of abstract extractive sense where you take rubber from Malaya, secure naval bases and supply routes through Suez and it's all sort of unfair to take other people's resources and profit off them... well we're not going to understand people who see them as matters that decide the life or death of tens of millions of their citizens, providing desperately needed time and space.
This situation is literally unprecedented. There has never been a major proxy war with a nuclear superpower fought right on its border. We are wandering into a very dangerous situation, harassing a paranoid schizophrenic with a fully loaded machine gun. Our Ukraine policy should have been not to have a policy, like we don't have a policy on whatever terrible things Saudi Arabia does, invading countries and blowing up civilians. Saudi Arabia is a can of worms we shouldn't open and they're useful as a partial ally. Russia is the same - it had tremendous possibilities as a counter to China, the real danger. The issue is that people like Brzezinski and co with understandable grudges against Russia arrived in the West and pushed this line of argument: 'Russia is innately imperialistic so the West must harass them at every turn and break their will to resist'. The interests of Poland or the Baltics should not unduly and expensively affect Western foreign policy.
If Russia was attacking important countries like the oil-rich Middle East or Taiwan, then it would be wise to defend them and obstruct Russia. But Ukraine is not important. What are we defending? There's some gas in Ukraine but far more in Russia, which we have now lost access to. They have some titanium but Japan produces far more. The moral argument against invading countries is ridiculous given our Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya adventures. There are still US troops in Syria.
The Soviet Union bordered Afghanistan, though that was a much smaller war.
Not proxy wars, but there were at least one war between URSS and China in 1964 and one between India and Pakistan in 1999, in both cases with both participants having nuclear weapons (and URSS being a superpower). Though admittedly both were fairly small in scale.
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