I think it’s actually very easy from grand simplified economics perspective for russia/ukraine, they both were extremely similar trajectory through the 90s (racketeering, wild wealth outflows, privatization, internal incohesion (more relevant to russia, but ukraine had crimea), broken supply chains, sometimes intentionally by western interests (airplanes/electronics).

But then chechen wars/size of russia/inability to get into eu/nato sharply diverged state-affiliated capitalist class interests, so russia softly silenced oligarchs (they still stole the money to europe, ofc, they just weren’t allowed to own means of propaganda), ukraine gone hogwild.

In the interest of any self respecting capitalist is to smear ussr (this is true throughout baltics/poland/yugoslavia/czechia/ukraine/russia/caucasian countries), so they all remembered (put in history books) bad shit ussr did + “life before communism”(tm)+excised anything positive ussr did, resulting in varying degrees of virulent nationalism with notes of collaborators acceptance (less so for czechia/former gdr).

The more western dream diverged for russia the more they have to go back to natural ussr geopolitics/the less they can outright smear them, thus soft stalin acceptance. While for ukraine, that didn’t hold (dnepro mafia didn’t exist in ussr, teehee), so they were slowly teaching new generations until average ukrainian under 30 is more mad about ussr than nazis (anecdotal, sample 5 people, 3 mad about ussr), same is true about extreme lib russians tbh.

Students/it guys/football fans (for oligarch money (kolomoyskiy, akhmetov, pinchuk, probably some odessa dipshit i don’t know)) were natural fertile soil to propagate eu dream (tm), while supplanting blame of material realities of ukraine (bunch of grifting oligarchs, tfw no oil) to russians aren’t allowing us into eu, cause they are evil and been evil for 500 years. Bada boom, bada bing.

I know they aren’t all nazis (and try to push back when I see such claims, that’s for israelis), but also significant part live in some kind of rapture land of being accepted into eu being some holy grail of country, and noticeable part do be like ooh bandera, liberator (strange they don’t take up makhno, wonder what’s the difference). Nato support I can’t even, mr z-man does his mi6 job since covid (it wasn’t a natural fusion of eu/nato, before 2014 support was like 20-30%, while eu always polled high)

*maybe a little jumbled, cause sleepi , feel free to correct timeline from ussr self destruct button (started in the 60s, so whatever)