>Has anyone noticed all the bizarrely pro-Putin comments on English language news sites over the past few weeks
I've noticed the opposite all over reddit -- people calling Russia an undeveloped dictator-ruled 3rd world country, saying that they should just get bombed by NATO, so on, so forth. It all just reminds me of the anti-Iraq comments from back in the day, and I'm sure the Cold War dialogue was not much different. The fact that we were so quick to recognize an independent ethnic-Albanian Kosovo in Russian-aligned Serbia but not an independent ethnic-Russian Crimea in EU-aligned Ukraine is one small evidence of that. Quite frankly, I'd wish the people of the US would keep their out-of-place views about East-European politics to themselves.
There is an orchestrated propaganda effort, no doubt about that, and it's from both sides.
I've noticed the opposite all over reddit -- people calling Russia an undeveloped dictator-ruled 3rd world country, saying that they should just get bombed by NATO, so on, so forth. It all just reminds me of the anti-Iraq comments from back in the day, and I'm sure the Cold War dialogue was not much different. The fact that we were so quick to recognize an independent ethnic-Albanian Kosovo in Russian-aligned Serbia but not an independent ethnic-Russian Crimea in EU-aligned Ukraine is one small evidence of that. Quite frankly, I'd wish the people of the US would keep their out-of-place views about East-European politics to themselves.
There is an orchestrated propaganda effort, no doubt about that, and it's from both sides.