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I think it’s because their government is saying anti-woke things and not importing millions of non-white immigrants.
Ukraine is also "anti-woke" and is much, much whiter than Russia.
Is this really an apples-to-apples comparison though? The Russian Federation has semi-autonomous republics where much of the non-ethnic-Russian population lives. Arguably these people shouldn't count towards the total if the crux of the matter is "how coherent is the Russian ethnic identity?" - it'd be like counting the entire population of the Philippines as "non-white Americans" during the time when it was an American colony.
You are confusing the ethnic republics which are mostly Siberian peoples with the Central Asian, largely Muslim migrants who are in every city including the core. The Russian nationalist's issue is with the latter. Pretty much no Russian nationalists ever say that Yakuts or Mari aren't Russians. In fact "only the Western Slavic core are the true Russians" is a talking point that's associated more with Ukrainian nationalists (replace "true Russians" with "true Slavs" where appropriate).
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Ukrainians are anti-woke. Ukraine is another matter.
The UPA apologia is certainly the opposite of whatever woke is, though it's true that the state doesn't participate in the western culture war the way Russia does.
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They are doing the second. Russia has no more qualms about retaining slavic identity than Berlin has with German and in 2023 they were importing half a million central Asians. If it were a more desirable place to live I am sure they would import even more.
If you look at the new laws, there's been a big shift since 2024 in how it's done. They've tightened the system significantly, making path to citizenship for migrants from Central Asia significantly harder, raising requirements in classic, immigrant dominated niches like food delivery and taxis, and now favoring North Korean, Indian and (rarely) African economic migrants that have absolutely zero paths to citizenship over Central Asians, who often have (or had) simplified paths to citizenship due to Soviet legacy. The system is the complete opposite of what the orangutans in EU have been doing
Western European governments have been doing exactly the same things (i.e. too little, too late from a right-populist perspective) over roughly the same timescale. I'm most familiar with the UK, because I live there, and there isn't anyone with a megaphone and an incentive to shout about how small boat immigration is about 50% off the peak or that a brown muslim Labour home secretary has closed the loopholes and abuses that enabled the Boriswave, but I suspect we have made more progress on reducing unwanted immigration than Russia has.
If you accept the far-right paradigm that %white is a key figure of merit for European and Europe-derived societies (or %white British for the UK specifically), then this doesn't matter because that number is still going down and slightly reducing the negative first derivative doesn't change the big picture. And in any case neither the far right nor the centre-right would want to make a Labour government look good. And the pro-establishment centre-left is constitutionally incapable of pointing out good news on unwanted immigration because they are too afraid of being called racist.
FWIW as a right-populist I'm sincerely impressed by what Labour and Mahmood have done, whilst also thinking much more needs to be done. Sadly I don't think Labour would do it, but if they did even half of it then I would vote for them.
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They are also, more darkly, sending their ethnic minorities to the front at much higher rates than ethnic Russians.
That's different minorities.
Which ones?
They are aborigines, not immigrants. And no one is sending them deliberately, poor rurals are always overrepresented in the armed forces.
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So the solution to the Biden wave is to send them to fight in Iran?
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