There Are No Good Russians - Blog Posts

I'm not calling any names and not getting into a personal confrontation. But with this comment under one of my recent posts I wanted to show you what a rare "normal" "good" russian looks like.

Ukrainians online and offline mostly get called slurs by russians, but the stereotypical "you knokhol pigs have no right to exist" shit doesn't evoke any feelings anymore. In me, at least. It's rare comments like this that truly get to me.

Let's set things straight: do I think it's easy being russian now? Do I think all russian people are bloodthirsty monsters who want to kill us all? Do I think all of them are doing absolutely nothing to oppose the regime? No. To all of the above.

But it's with the russian "liberal opposition" that you most often get the "we're sorry and ashamed, but…" You know how in relationships with abusive, manipulative, self-involved people you never get to hear a sincere apology? It's always "sorry but" – either "but I suffer too", "I am not to blame", "I had no bad intentions" etc. That's the same thing with most of the "good" russians.

Do I think it's fair that some of them had to leave their homes and their country behind, when they never voted for putin and didn't "want the war"? No. Things are rarely fair in this world. But you can just say you're ashamed by your nation, or you're devastated by the fact that your countrymen recently killed 20 innocent people, including 9 children, with a ballistic missile, in the middle of the day. You don't have to add your personal struggles commenting on such news, to show that you are also a victim.

Especially when you're commenting on a blog run by a Ukrainian living in Ukraine. You have no idea what most of us have been or are going through, what or who we have lost because of your country. I lost not only my home, but my city, and some other cities near and dear to me, like my grandma's town where I spent all my summer breaks - lie in ruins. Uninhabitable. Nothing but a pile of rubble. Because your country destroyed it.

We don't need to hear how sorry and ashamed you are, when it doesn't come from a place of sincerity and accountability. You can make this about yourself under the posts about russian struggles, or in your own space. Don't come to us with this shit. Our ability to empathise with you gets crippled by each day our people die and our cities get vaporized.

I genuinely don’t even know how to respond to this. (X)

So majestic, those russkies

In my class we had a refugee from Ukraine whose native language was Russian for a few months (she then moved to a different city) and we have like 6 Russians in our class, but none of them ever talked to her even though they all spoke Russian fluently. It was obvious how much they hated her because she was from Ukraine.

Me and some others in our class tried helping her out a bit but it was not so easy because she only spoke very few English and German.

Gotta say I thought the people in our class would show more support, like even some of the Non-Russians, but with Russian friends, were bitter. The majority would speak to her (over an translator) one or two times and then just coexist. I and like three others were the only ones who were actually sometimes with her during school. (The Ukrainians in our school visited a German class during most of our classes, so that they didn’t have to just sit there and listen to someone teaching something in a language they didn’t understand.)

But, I was actually shocked about the fact that our Russians didn’t want to talk to her, because at I know that at least three or four of them aren’t Putin fans. I mean ignoring a classmate is definitely not the worst thing Russians do to Ukrainians outside of the war but I still think it’s important about the ignorance of some. Maybe not all Russians are Pro-Putin but the majority isn’t as Anti-Putin as they should be, either.

After a russian missile strike on Chernihiv killed 6 year old Sophia 64 000(!!!) russians posted and reposted jokes, such as "Chernihiv. Selling child sandals. Unworn."

When russian missile hit Vinnytsya in 2022, killing 23 people among whom was 4 year old Lisa, tens of thousands of russians online mocked her disability, laughing at her death, or even making open claims that she's better off dead.

They think murdering children is funny. They think dead children are funny.

It's definitely not "just Putin". The russian society is rotten to its core.

When I see some foreigners wholeheartedly say that Ukrainians shouldn't judge all russians by the actions of the russian army, I think they miss a couple of points.

Firstly, Western belief that there is good in every person leads to self-deception and naivety. Many people still want to believe that russian society isn't different from the ones they live in. "Well, of course they are just like us. Look at their cities, at their youth, look at the things their activists write and say. Army gets the orders from the government, that's it. Ordinary people are against this war" Well, I don't know about you, but in my country army IS a part of the society. In fact, it's a scaled down version of the society. Soldiers aren't grown in laboratories where they gain their own, separate mentality.

Of course, if you are lucky/unlucky enough to speak russian, you know that the image and the essence of the russian mentality are two different things. russians are extremely good at creating an attractive and somewhat alluring image of their country for those who don't go in too deep. People who still try to judge russians from their own, West-oriented perspective, make a huge mistake. They conclude that the ordinary russians strive to the same values and civilizational goals as a common folk from, let's say, Berlin or Copenhagen.

The second thing has to do with us, Ukrainians. For us it's not the time for the shades of gray. To survive and to gain the victory, we need to look at the enemy through a white and black lense. Here are us and there are them. If we start pondering which russian is better and which is worse, we risk to lose everything. Every living russian at this given moment is an enemy - either a current or a potential one. Those russians who were kids at the beginning of the war in 2014, grew up and came to kill us in 2022. So we don't have the privilidge of going through all of the life details of those russians who beat themselves in the chest and proclaim they are good. Besides, in most cases after a few crucial questions 'good' russians turn into the ordinary ones. And thus we return to the first point once again - it's improtant to understand that russians are extremely good at hiding their ugly core from those who don't study the topic deep enough.