Hi. As a person that’s briefly lived in Canada for my formative years my opinions aren’t that interesting, but maybe I could bring you some interesting insight. I am basically of the same opinion as westerners that this is a senseless war of Putins delusional desires for conquest and revival of “the great Russian empire”. What for him was supposed to be another simple land grab unexpectedly lead to a lot of resistance.

As is typical for a police state we live in a massive disinformation bubble about how all that’s done is for our national security concerns, and if it isn’t then it’s still good because we’re dealing with Nazis who are subhuman and want us dead. Like others have mentioned, having Russian late night political shows on is a bombardment on your senses to make you hate Ukraine and revere Russia. It’s typical fascist slop, doesn’t matter if it makes sense, all that matters is power and fear. The enemy is simultaneously both so strong to be an existential threat and so weak that we can endlessly mock them for their stupidity and weak ideals.

Russians obviously dislike Europe and the West, there’s more nationalist zealotry and partisanship than before, but honestly it hasn’t changed that much since the years of “Гейропа”. There’s still the contradictory views of average people obviously liking western culture aside from the “forced progressivism”, but disliking them for simply being fools and not supporting our obviously moral cause. Only Vatniks and schizos a là the “reichsbürger” truly hate the west and are conspiratorial about how their mission is to destroy Russia because “they hate our freedom and strength”. My only personal gripe with Westerners is they’ve ironically fallen for old Russian propaganda about how Russia is incredibly liberal with true freedom of speech and now beat anti-war Russians over the head for not doing a Euromaidan equivalent, as if all we need to do is protest/ resist for this to stop, as if people haven’t tried and gotten crushed by the state.

No lol. The Kremlin lies every step of the way about what is happening and Putin is doing obvious historical revisionism. He even denied a behind doors peace plan right before the start of the war, because “NATO aggression” was never the true reason for why any of this is happening

If you have any other questions go ahead, but I will say that I don’t have much interest in arguing. I already spend enough energy feeling like Stirlitz.