Sudden Love for Ukraine: Where Does the Hatred for Russia Come From?

Sudden Love for Ukraine: Where Does the Hatred for Russia Come From?

About two days ago, average knowledge about Ukraine, according to the opening message of the debate, fit into a crude cliché about its women. Today, that same message claims support for the country is massive and rejection of Russia is almost unanimous. For many participants, this is not explained by any diplomatic summit: it is explained by a TV schedule that decides each morning who is the good guy. The question ordering the entire subject is where this support for Ukraine and hatred for Russia comes from in a population that, according to another participant, just recently knew nothing about the war in Donbas.

The narrative that fabricates sides: television, propaganda, and NATO

The consensus is broad. Most place the origin of the enthusiasm in the same channels that have been managing collective anger for years: networks some claim are bought, Atlantic propaganda, and an information apparatus that decides which tragedies exist and which are archived. "It seems that NATO propaganda works," summarizes one intervention, before launching the warning hovering over half the discussion: we will see when hunger starts to bite.

The argument is not that the facts are false, but that the selection is biased. The war in Donbas, those holding this thesis recall, had been off-screen for years. What does not appear on TV does not exist, another message sentences. Here opens the rift: between those who believe the media informs and those who believe it fabricates reality to convenience.

Cobi19 taught the mechanism two years earlier

The parallel with the pandemic appears again and again. The same channels that two years ago managed the narrative of the health crisis now distribute cards of good and bad. "From those who made 99% of the normal population accept being locked in their homes and wearing a muzzle for two years," reads a message condensing the anger.

Episodes are cited as proof that the mechanism is reversible and repeats. The 8:00 PM applause, blind trust in an injection these messages describe as unproven, hatred for those who, according to them, did not participate in the experiment. Those who felt manipulated then distrust by default; those who swallowed the first, they reason, are condemned to swallow the second. Distrust has become a reflex, not a conclusion.

Those who look to Russia from the memory of the Warsaw Pact

There is a less cynical and more visceral current that needs no television to wish the worst upon the Kremlin. Those with gray hair remember Russia trying to liquidate half the world and keeping hundreds of millions enslaved in what they describe as an immense prison from which one could not escape. That, they say, marks forever.

From this perspective, Ukraine receives the support any neighboring country invaded would receive, without prior sympathy. Objection comes immediately: today's Russia is not the USSR, which dissolved in 1991. "You are worse than those who blame everything on Franco," responds another. Historical memory against the present, without an arbiter in sight.

Is Ukraine a homogeneous country? Russian-speakers and invisible wars

Against the narrative of a victim without nuance appears the fine print. It is claimed that Russian-speakers make up around 40% of the Ukrainian population and have been targeted for years, with internal grievances the coverage does not record. The figure is launched as a corrective to those who discover the country on the evening news.

The tally of knowns that do not fit also emerges. Families who adopted Russian children or hosted Chernobyl minors do not understand how a country that exported that now accumulates tanks and missiles. The contradiction is not resolved; it is parked, like almost everything.

Iraq 2003 and the hatred of going back and forth

The most repeated precedent is the invasion of Iraq. There was then a considerable wave of rejection of the United States, and today it is interpreted as the exact mirror of what is happening with Russia. The implicit conclusion: geopolitical hatred has an expiration date and is renewed with each conflict put in prime time.

Added to this is a background suspicion. Some claim today's Russia is not the USSR and that rejection is built more on the memory of communism than on concrete facts. The diagnosis is harsh: part of public opinion votes its indignation for what its grandparents told them.

Neither with one side nor the other: the fatigue of a foreign war

A growing segment declares itself apart. For some participants, both sides are the same, a stance gaining ground as the conflict intensifies. Before the invasion, they claim, support for Ukraine was residual; now, they denounce, there are too many newly activated accounts and too much epic. Fashion, they say, is as good an explanation as any other.

Amid the noise, the conversation drifts toward terrains having nothing to do with Eastern Europe: language in Catalonia, Francoism, the independence of who knows what. The war becomes a domestic battleground where other accounts are settled. "Watch less TV and less internet, and live more and read more books," concludes an intervention.

Where does the hatred come from, then? From television for some, from Soviet memory for others, from simple irritation at a foreign war for the third. Each explanation bounces against the next and none convinces the majority. The conversation gets stuck right there: at the point where everyone has a cause and no one accepts the neighbor's.