I don’t think people appreciate enough just how hard this war is “Westernizing” Ukraine. Ukraine has, between the end of the USSR and now, been pretty starkly divided on western and revisionist outlook arguably partially due to a successful russification effort starting with Catherine and culminating with Stalin, but also that a transition to capitalism introduces a culture shock that people who aren’t used to market economies haven’t adapted to yet and can be mismanaged to empower the same politburo from before but as a class of industrial plutocrats, and just the simple fact that westernization is affiliated with becoming more socially progressive, which is a growing pain for any society. Embracing social progress in return for access to the west’s wealth is a hard sell for a lot of people who would rather be poor but proud of their Nazi grandpa (East and West Germany give us a clear test tube example that eastern bloc states generally have denazified less aggressively than NATO founders).

What? Where did any of this come from? Did someone just type random letters on a phone keyboard and let autocorrect fill it in? Why do I keep clicking these reddit links?