A Love Letter from Russia to America [from an anonymous Russian citizen] ( web.archive.org )

"Our first democratically elected leader [in Russia], a goofy old politician, handed the reins of power to a serious young security officer in 1999. We love our strong men here. At first, Putin was enamored of you [America]. When he said in the early 2000s that he saw America as our “best partner” he meant it. When he said that the break-up of the U.S.S.R. was a tragedy, he used the term literally: massive human suffering. That line was followed by a far less quoted clause: “Anyone who wants to restore it is brainless.”

"Don’t get me wrong. I’m not justifying [Putin's] lust for power and destruction of Russia and Ukraine. I’m just sharing our perspective on a lost opportunity and the origins of the current nightmare."

[...]

"[The young people] have a thirst and understanding for freedom and peace and don’t believe in tales of Western plots to destroy the fatherland. Unfortunately, they were compelled to demonstrate those values by leaving the country before and during mobilization. We are now a million citizens short. More to come (well… go). They are not cowards. They just didn’t drink the Kool Aid. They don’t want to kill or be killed without reason."

[...]

"Though we are both enslaved by our military-industrial complexes, our tradition of enslavement goes much deeper. While your [American] white people oppressed another race, our [Russian] nobility enslaved fellow Caucasians. This continued into the U.S.S.R., with the Communist elite the new masters. Now we toil under the yoke of kleptocrats."

[...]

"Ironically, self-loathing, a corollary of the slave mentality, leads to the kind of arrogance spewing from the mouths of our state-funded pundits — the ultimate PR team for the pigs in the house. Such conceit is a luxury and makes it easy to shed values and hurt others — peaceful neighboring countries as well as our own people."

"Despite what Dostoyevsky wrote, we are no longer hung up on introspection. We have become a nation of ostriches run by a few lunatics and their equally deranged minority of supporters."