You’re on a hiding to nothing. The sheer ridiculousness of Hardspunned and other “it’s all about the USA, homos and NATO” fellow travellers beggars belief.
There’s no convincing them that these are merely supporting argument angles to Putin’s primary ideological mission... despite Putin spending far more time writing about it than anything else.
He’s all about restoring and enforcing the sphere of influence once enforced by the Soviet Union. In a nutshell, “unity” by force over the independent ex-SSRs and some of the ex Warsaw Pact. Central rule from Moscow, with gauleiters running the client states. The paperwork for it in Belarus is already signed by Lukashenko. It’s already “done deals” in Tatarstan, Ingushetia and Chechnya. He’s already attempted it in Georgia and Crimea. The regional annexations in Ukraine are carbon copies of what he’s already done elsewhere.
There’s no convincing the likes of Hardspunned that Putin’s rationale is bogus
If they actually understood the USSR they’d know that the USSR was a superstate, notionally a union that contained a Russian SSR as well as a Ukrainian SSR... Within it, the SSRs were client states - and Russia was also a client state.
Moscow was the location of the USSR leadership but outside Moscow, the Russian SSR was a client state just like Ukraine and Georgia. That’s why Belarus, Ukraine and Russia had equal status as independent countries after the Union was dissolved.
The end of the Union didn’t disenfranchise Russia at all. Russian SSR actually got everything that the other SSRs got, and more. Almost all the ex Soviet elites and super rich were headquartered in Moscow or had connections with Moscow. Independent Russia was mostly dirt poor but independent Moscow was a playground for the super rich and super powerful.
Putin conflates the loss of influence over the Warsaw Pact and ex SSRs (from Moscow) with the end of the USSR. He’s wrong. It’s an illusion.
Domination from Moscow had bugger all to do with the politics or culture of the Russian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic. It only existed because Moscow was the center of Union operations, where the richest, most influential, most corrupt, most ruthless and most feared Soviet Union elites were concentrated.
Putin wants for Eastern Europe something even worse than the USSR - a totalitarian superstate, run by Moscow for the benefit of the most feared, corrupted, super rich elites in Muscovy.
Under his model most of the state of Russia will be just as impoverished and subjugated as the ‘Stans, and the Donbas, and the far East.
Sevastopol, St Petersburg, Moscow and Volgograd may be privileged locations. How many other big cities will benefit?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Russia_by_population
Negotiated peace with Putin is a bizarre idea. The guy has Empire building ambitions like Hitler, combined with a Hitleresque obsession with redressing a “humiliation” that unlike Germany’s post WW1 was self-inflicted by the USSR and was not seen as a humiliation when it was endorsed by the Russian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic in the Belovezha Accords.
Putin’s s definition of “Nazi” is anyone living in the footprint of what once was the USSR who doesn’t love the idea of Moscow deposing their leaders and owning their ass.
His definition of “denazification” is, ending the aspirations of already free countries to continue to exist without being under the new Muscovy jackboot.
His objection to NATO expansion has bugger all to do with thinking NATO threatened Russia. It’s more an unacceptable inconvenience that Moscow can’t overrun the Baltics with tanks without risking an article 5 level response.
(Maybe that’s why Putin is offended at the idea of Ukraine joining NATO but turns out to be not bothered by Finland and Sweden possibly joining. He wasn’t planning to invade Scandinavia.)
And Globohomo? Well, that’s just an argument made to keep American bible thumping gay obsessed useful idiots on side.
Russia’s full of serial killers, sadists, fascists, neo nazis, sodomites, pedos, pimps, racketeers and child killers... and the new Russian order sure as shit isn’t going to punish them if they sign up for Wagner, and do their crimes in Ukraine.
The first wave of the worst of the worst scum released from Russia’s prisons to return from their tours of duty is already causing massive consternation inside the RF.
Russia is the only nation state in the world which not only has an overt, public, official state policy of forced child abduction and adoption, but has the brass neck to celebrate it to the point of getting the Child Catcher in chief to address the UN.
Could Russia Breakup after Putin???? "The Soviet Union came apart because it overstretched itself and ran out of money and ideas. Local elites saw no benefit in remaining part of a bankrupt country. It fragmented along the administrative borders of the 15 republics that made up the giant country. Yet there was no reason why the process had to stop there. Indeed, many of Russia’s regions—including Siberia, Ural, Karelia and Tatarstan—declared their “sovereignty” at the time." https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/could-russia-breakup-after-putin.html