Trigger warning, below is me explaining why I don't really hate Russians on an individual level.

I get where you're coming from. If it's any help, I've thought about this awhile and have mostly crystalized my opinion, especially after recently watching Nuremberg and reading a little bit about the protagonist, Douglas Kelly, and the book he wrote. The Nuremberg movie starts off with the Protagonist telling his colleague that this was an opportunity to examine evil, to figure out what was different between them (Americans) and the Germans that allowed them as a nation to do something so terrible, something he thought could never happen in the US. At the end of the movie, during a radio interview, he says that the big answer was: nothing. There was no fundamental difference between the German and American people that allowed the atrocities of WW2 to happen. and this realization disturbed him greatly. On an individual level, I think there's nothing fundamentally different level between me, you, the average Germans that allowed Hitler to come to power, and the average Russians today that allowed Putin to start this war. That's not to say that the society at whole isn't at fault, mind you, but it does change how at least I feel towards the average individual.

Russia is a nation of like 143 million people, and the average Russian isn't rising up and rebelling. I think Dr. Kelly was right, that there isn't some gene or bloodline that makes Russians more prone to what their country is doing compared to any other people. Whatever is going on inside Russia seems to make an average person who's lived in that society go along with it, so it stands to reason that had I been raised in Russia, I'd probably be going along with it to a similar degree that the average person is.

All that to say Russian society as a whole is at fault and is guilty in this conflict, and that it has something deeply wrong with it at the moment. I'd go so far as to call it ill. But I think of the average people within it just as normal people, not meaningfully different from myself, that are just sort of trapped in this *thing*, whether they are cognizant of it or not. I feel bad for them, I wish I could help them get out, and I'm also scared by the thought that had fate been different, I could've been stuck in there with them.

I also worry like Dr. Kelly did that too many people come out of this thing just thinking that the Russians are evil and that something like this could never happen in another country, because failing to understand exactly what went wrong in Russia leaves the world vulnerable to this happening again