Wasn't really sure where to post this, but the content is primarily political or perhaps historical so I thought this was as good a place as any. It is perhaps a bit rambling, but the conversations themselves are a lot less linear than what I write here and I have already lent a certain chronological coherency to them.

I have a co worker from the Ukraine and literally the first thing he ever said to me was, "People think Ukrainians are Russians, but we are not we are our own people." and I sort of wrote him off early on, but was always cordial. After that we started to slowly talk more and more about politics and Putin and so on. One day I brought up how I didn't like that Putin seems to use Soviet imagery in a sort of MAGA way that isn't genuine, and he said "You know the Russian people hate the USSR" and I was like uuhhhh, I am pretty sure that is not true. Lot's of Russians still think it was good. And he goes on about how they did the Holodomor and I said well, that is Ancient history, after WWII life wasn't too bad for quite a while he Ukraine. Seeing that I wasn't really a totally deluded westerner he opened up and said, you know, my grandmother is a staunch lover of Stalin and the USSR. I asked if she was ethnically Russian, and he said no, she is Ukrainian.

We talked back and forth about this stuff more and then more recently he brought up the Belarusian journalist. He asked if I had heard about the situation and I said I know a bit, a journalist was arrested and he said "No no, he is no journalist, he is a dissident." I said the western media says he is a journalist and he says that's nonsense. I said that I was aware that he was in the Azov battalion and he said no no, not true, and then I said I had seen pictures and footage of him in uniform and he sort of laughed and said haha, you know more than me (he knew) and then told me that he was on Nexta I think it is called, the telegram that the guy worked on, but didn't say too much more about it.

The most recent conversation was the most interesting. He brought up this pipeline that wasn't going to go through Ukraine and that they had lost a lot of money because of it. He said all he wanted was for the Ukraine to be as rich as Poland so he could live with his people and have opportunity, and I said that seems like an extremely reasonable goal, but I said, if you were Putin would YOU put the pipeline through Ukraine? How does he know you won't sabotage it. And he conceded that he would be crazy to do so. Then we talked a bit about Donbas and the conflict there. I said why don't you just let them go, if most of them want to leave, just let them leave, because they don't feel included after the Maidan uprising and he said that a lot of Ukrainians are starting to think that way (he then went down some rabbit hole about how they are all ex criminals from the gulag and no good, but I digress). I said that the Ukraine has an unfortunate situation now, it is a small country between Europe and Russia and that you need to find a way to move forward with Russia. I said that I thought that NATO was using Ukraine as a pawn and an excuse to continue military buildup outside Russia and that Russia didn't want NATO in Ukraine, and he said we have the right to have NATO then I said, how would the US behave if Russia started to build military bases in Mexico? Do you want NATO and then to sacrifice your relationship with Russia? and then he sort of agreed that yeah, they were probably being used as Pawns and it was bad.

Then the conversation turned to Belarus. He said he knew people from Belarus and went to school with them and that they loved Lukashenko, he is their guy, why would they like him? I said well why are there people that still like Stalin, and he sort of scoffed, and I said no really, isn't it because despite the hardship he resisted all of the foreign powers and wreckers and kept the country together and stable and defeated the Nazis and he agreed that that was the reason. And then I said look at Syria. I said everyone wants democracy and choice, but when you are faced with Assad or ISIS, who are you going to pick? The choice is a no brainer. I said with Lukashenko, when the ukraine was plunged into terrible deprivation, they kept a continuity and a stability with the old ways and that people can see that. I said when Lukashenko goes, the vultures will come and tear the country apart just like the Ukraine and he sort of apprehensively agreed that capitalist reform had been a disaster in Ukraine and that there was probably something to what I was saying. He asked why I thought they were losing their language and culture, and I said that I thought that the Lenin had decided early on that nations should be respected and that their cultures should be maintained (at one point in another conversation he had said that Stalin and the USSR had tried to destroy Ukrainian culture and I called it out as bullshit and he conceded that it was probably bullshit), but when the USSR collapsed the profit motive took over and media companies didn't care about cultures and it was too expensive to make Belarusian content so they just bombarded them with Russian content. Then he said the best part. When I was talking about Lenin and imperialism and national liberation and so on, I could tell I wasn't teaching him anything he didn't already know, and after the bit about the free market being what destroyed Belarus he said in sort of a lamenting way, "You know, I know Lenin, My parent's generation knows Lenin, but the young people today, they don't know him. This generation is going to forget." I said well, that's a shame because in many places in the world he is a hero and he shaped so much of history. and he sort of nodded. At this point he just seemed sort of super conflicted, and went to bed.

Anyway, I have found the conversations really interesting, and frankly I don't think I would have been able to make any progress without a lot of information I have found on this site and I thought I would share.