Putin’s political opponents frequently fall out of windows or catch some polonium poisoning.

Hmm… I wonder what happened to the original leadership of BLM? And hey, what are Fred Hampton and Mark Clark up to these days? Has Gary Webb published any articles recently?

These things are not the same, and pretending they are, makes you blind to how much worse they can still get. Russia is absolutely more of a brutal dictatorship than even the US, but especially than most European countries.

Oh believe me, I am well aware how bad they can get, you’re just completely unaware of how bad they’ve already been. You believe all these lies about how terrible Russia is, looking at it only through the lens that western propagandists have carefully cultivated for you without realizing that every accusation they’ve levied on their enemies is a confession about what they themselves have been doing all along. You’re as intellectually domesticated by US imperialist interests as any diehard Kremlin-supporting Russian citizen, only you have the benefit of being on the side that enjoys global hegemony without even understanding what that word means. You’re all up in arms about the lies of the media of an enemy state without having even an ounce of self awareness about the lies of the media you’re consuming, the very same media from which you think you’ve learned how uniquely bad the enemy’s media is.