“Are you Russian?”
Are we not all Russians?
You strike me as Russian. Are you?
No, we aren't. Russia has never know Democracy and have only experience in Autocracies, brutality, and internal and occasionally external terror.
Any fool who allows himself to believe that "they're just like us" has got their head up their wazoo.
I served with Russians back when they called themselves Soviets and they were not ashamed at all of their large and small brutalities - they even seemed proud of them. KAL 007? "they were spying". Maj Nicholson being allowed to bleed to death while preventing us to reach him and try to save his life? "It's just the Tartar in us" said with a grin.
What they do to themselves, they deserve.
What they do to others has to be opposed, even if it means all-out war.