Thread by @TheStanislawski

I noticed that a lot of people from Western democracies with imperial past don’t get that ethnic Russians living in Ukraine (especially Crimea), the Baltics, Caucasus are not indigenous ethnic minorities.

They are mostly Russia’s colonial settlers.
1/10

Russians in Crimea and the Baltics often moved into the houses of recently deported indigenous owners.

Russians across ex-colonies have enjoyed all the privileges of a colonizer nation for centuries — they aren’t an oppressed population in any common sense of this term.
2/10

Whenever Russia claims its people are being oppressed in Latvia or Ukraine — it’s because these countries are decolonizing themselves and balancing out the existing system of Russian privilege (especially language-wise).
3/10

The fact that some people (and especially journalists!) believe these nasty Eastern Europeans oppress Russians based on their ethnicity only shows the ignorance and ego-centered approach of people from countries with imperial past.
4/10

Their natural point of view is that of a colonizer, and they look at Eastern Europe’s affairs from that perspective.

They fail to see Russia as the historical colonizer of that region and indigenous Eastern Europeans as the oppressed people doing some basic decolonization.
5/10

This projection of their own biases results in absolutely distorted headlines like in this recent tweet:
6/10

https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1655595915711852544

You see, there are thousands of ethnic Russians (mostly post-1945 settlers) in the Baltic states who learned the local languages and received citizenship years ago.

But then there are chauvinists who don’t think Latvia is a real country and wait for Russia to invade.
7/10

The Baltics are doing a great job of defending themselves from a neighboring empire, and their decolonization is simple and humane: learn the basics of our language and history, respect our independence, and live happily ever after.
8/10

And yet I keep seeing the same mistakes in western coverage of our region where Russian colonial settlers are portrayed as the victims of savage Eastern Europeans.

This has to stop.
9/10

Start by recognizing your biases and listening to Eastern Europeans — the people with generational knowledge of Russian imperialism and the power balance in their native region.

That’s all I had to say.

10/10