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I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?
So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Oh Dear, Anyway.
Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.
Again, how far up the food chain does somone have to be before citing them changes from "nut-picking" to "evidence"
I haven't seen much in the way of endorsement and support presented. In terms of talking heads that can be in some sense argued to be in good standing with the Russian state, approximately an infinite amount - what matters is policy, not talk.
So what you're saying is that eliminating a language to dissuade any future notions of independence can be acceptable, and we are just haggling over the price?
Comparable to holding Trump accountable for things that Alex Jones says, maybe. As far as I can tell Putin-Dugin connections are on the level of "someone claimed..." and supposed dogwhistles.
Literally who? I had to google him (your misspelling of the name didn't help), and it sounds like... he is someone who wrote an inflammatory thinkpiece that was published on RIAN? I'm sure you can find some crazy editorials in Western flagship media (like the WaPo's cheerleading for invading Iraq), and for actual government media on Ukraine, here's VoA echoing Ukrainian conspiracy theories that the Russians are bombing themselves. I doubt every opinion piece they publish is ordered from the top.
Can I one-up this with Rumsfeld's creepy Bible quotes for invading Iraq? That one's even from an actual official member of government.
All in all, I think you could make a similar and stronger case that the American elites of the time endorsed and supported the actual idea of launching an honest-to-god religious crusade into Iraq. As much as I like smearing neocons, I don't think this would be accurate either.
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