Syria and Iran are allies with Russia currently.
You can know a lot about somebody by who are their friends.
Same with countries.
No fan of Ukraine and no encourager of conflict with Russia, but Russia is the bad guy.
Kind of reminds me of the time in school when a giant bully (who happened to be Russian) picked on this obnoxious little dweeb. He just started hitting him for no reason.
The dweeb was just existing and hadn’t done anything to deserve getting picked on.
And the bully was completely out of line. But it was hard to come to the dweeb’s defense because he was just such a dick.