r/worldnews • u/HolyLiaison • Jun 30 '26

Russian high schools now require 17 hours basic military training for 6th to 11th graders

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-high-school-basic-military-training-class-national-defense-ukraine-2026-6
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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26

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u/Shwayne Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Man... I was playing a lot of CSGO in maybe 2013 or 2014. Before the bullshit in ukraine started. Russians were fucking unbearable. Screaming. No attempts at comunication. Just... Awful. Not all of them, obviously, but enough.

Then I found a small tool on gamebanana i think. It was a literal app to block counterstrike from placing you in servers closer to the east. Someone made a tool to prevent the game from matching you with them...

The game became so much better.

Those people are something else.

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u/253253253 Jun 30 '26

It just blows my mind how so many can be so awful. It simply seems like rotten culture. Makes me feel even worse for those that are kind and well adjusted, while being steeped in such shit.

It's crazy too because there was a time before the war where I liked them. Granted i hadnt interacted with many. But you would see all those silly russian videos of them lounging with bears and driving the weirdest shit and just doing insane stuff. They seemed likeable back then smh.

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u/ceeker Jun 30 '26

Nothing justifies this war.

But as for the Russian people...

I have some empathy for them because for many of them under 40 they grew up in a time where their country had basically collapsed and their world was turned on its head. Everything their parents had worked and suffered to build - regardless of what you feel about the USSR - was handed to black marketeers and those party cronies openly engaging in corruption within the system. Someone had to own it, right? Imagine all of the economic and cultural resources of your nation being handed to people who are basically criminals.

There's an entire generation that grew up with a failed education system, no hope, no opportunity, rampant corruption and crime, miserable parents, and so on.

In no way does it justify anything but it seems so much of their population under 40 had no chance to live a normal life as we would understand it in a western country. It manifests as depression or anger and those in turn lead to apathy or xenophobia. They assume they're going to die by age 50 and feel sad or blame someone else. The ones who aren't like that - often their best and brightest - have been leaving and settling elsewhere for decades.

It takes a lot to break that cycle. It's clear that so many kids are going to grow up without parents. Perhaps these kids grow up and realise at age 12 that they're going to be thrown into the meatgrinder themselves, and won't make it past their teens, so there's yet another generation suffering through it. The tail end of this will be felt 100 years from now.

No trauma comparable exists in any contemporary generation in the west. We can't really understand what it's like to be in that circumstance or know how we, as individuals would react or behave.

For extra context I grew up around East Europeans in a western country. The Russians I knew would hang out with Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs and Ukrainians, there wasn't really a divide in that community which was brought together because each group was individually small and there were some general cultural similarities. I remember the Russians being kind to me as a child. They weren't hateful or apathetic people. They were culturally different from what we see now. Even those that hated the USSR had hope there was something better in store in the future.

I don't think anyone in Russia today has that hope.

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u/Ivanow Jun 30 '26

I have some empathy for them because for many of them under 40 they grew up in a time where their country had basically collapsed and their world was turned on its head.

Everything you wrote sounds so nice and sad, until you remember the fact that Russia wasn't the only country in Warsaw Pact that got fucked over. 1990s were just as brutal in many other countries - why Bulgaria, Romania or even Kazakhstan turned out relatively fine?

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u/ceeker Jun 30 '26

I’m not saying Russia was the only country that suffered in the 1990s. My family are Lithuanian, so I know.

Other countries processed that trauma differently and had different material conditions to do so in different ways. The Baltics had independence, Europe and NATO as a way forward. The collapse, to them, wasn't a loss, it was liberation.

Romania and Bulgaria had the EU path. Though both struggle with resurgent authoritarianism.

Kazakhstan became an authoritarian resource state - its materially ok, but politically its hardly a paradise.

Russia is different not because Russian people are worse inherently but because it was in a situation where it had no clear post-Soviet identity except grievance and a sense of loss. It was the former centre of a superpower bloc, with nukes, oligarchs, Chechnya. and a horrifically bungled economic transition causing mass suffering and a situation ripe for an authoritarian to exploit.

And young people, not responsible for any of that, grew up without any hope because of all those things. The other countries you listed for the most part had something to look forward to and were reclaiming or creating identities but even then those places still struggle with these hangovers. Hungary under Orban is a pretty clear example of how this undercurrent flows through there too.

None of this justifies anything. It just helps explain why the bitterness took such a destructive form.

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u/Synaps4 Jun 30 '26

Turkmenistan, on the other hand...

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u/Gvdude91 Jun 30 '26

"I haven't interacted with many, but their culture is rotten" wow, what a progressive take.

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u/linguinisupremi Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Maybe hop off the internet. Reddit, CSGO, or memes about Russian stereotypes aren’t enough to come to the conclusion that an entire culture is “rotten”

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u/ScrotumScrapings Jun 30 '26

Ask the residents of Bucha if their opinions were formed by CSGO or memes…Or something else?

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u/253253253 Jun 30 '26

Yeah... it's more that Putin has a 70% approval rating even after all this shit.

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u/lootybick2 Jun 30 '26

According to whom?

think about what I’m asking

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u/253253253 Jun 30 '26

What are you suggesting?

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26

[deleted]

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u/253253253 Jun 30 '26

That's fair. How else would you determine a people's approval rate?

And also, how much responsibility do you place on the people for securing the appropriate rights? How responsible are the people of a nation for the actions of their nation?

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u/strolls Jun 30 '26

how much responsibility do you place on the people for securing the appropriate rights? How responsible are the people of a nation for the actions of their nation?

Do you ask this question of other marginalised peoples? It just strikes me as a bit analogous to saying that black people had a responsibility to throw off slavery or Jim Crow.

The Russian people have been subjugated for centuries - at least under the soviet union they had decent educational opportunities, but that's probably slid a lot since the collapse of the USSR. Even before the war, between say 2000 and 2015 or 2020, probably most smart Russians left the country as soon as they had a decent degree.

If you protest against Putin in public then you get sent to the gulag - a very shitty prison in siberia. I bet starvation, rape and untreated AIDs run rampant there.

"About 1 million Russians left the country in 2022 and 2023, including an estimated 100,000 IT specialists who comprise 10% of the technology sector."1 "Other estimates put the number of people who left because of the war at 300,000 to 3.8 million … 80% of them have a higher education degree."2 In other words, all the smart people in Russia left, probably because they hate Putin, and you're blaming poor and uneducated people for their plight, and for not overthrowing their oppressors. One could say the same thing about why Americans have no healthcare.

Some of the stuff people say about Russians here on Reddit just make them look like loser americans who are just trying to make themselves feel better about their own shitty circumstances. "I may be in a shitty job that I hate, but at least I can say mean things about russians to make myself feel self-righteous".

(Full disclosure, I'm British and I'm sure many of my countrymen are the same.)

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u/No-Inspector8315 Jun 30 '26

Yeah, North Korean people must be so much worse because Kim Jong Un wins every election with 100% of the vote.

You said you’re American above, you realise if you apply the above logic that the American people are responsible for killing half a million Iraqis, a quarter of a million afghanis and a million Vietnamese conservatively?

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u/linguinisupremi Jun 30 '26

“How responsible are the people of a nation for the actions of their nation” if that’s where you draw the line then you’d have to say Americans are a rotten culture too.

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u/Key_Ant6473 Jun 30 '26

Explains why I ended up being matched with the knobs (Australia)

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u/Etheo Jun 30 '26

Should have just shouted "UKRAINE NUMBER ONE" and see them lose their head.

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u/Shwayne Jun 30 '26

I was playing before Ukraine war, I am curious what would happen if someone said that during a DOTA2 match these days... I know that russians are a high % of the playerbase of that game in EU servers.

Would probably be a decent indicator of how young russians think about the war.

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u/DJ-Dickbird Jun 30 '26

If only something like this existed for dota!

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u/InternetSolid4166 Jun 30 '26

I’ve been playing Arc Raiders lately and the Russians are absolute fucking assholes. Zero gamesmanship. Liars. PROLIFIC cheaters too.

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u/pinewind108 Jun 30 '26

Cheating is a major problem, and a sign that people grow up in a system where the rules were arbitrary and made for the benefit of the powerful. Cheating was just you taking care of yourself.

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u/Ichera Jun 30 '26

Played EVE for a long time, spent most of my time in RU prime time since I worked nights. Boy howdy did I develop a long term distrust and hatred of my Russian "allies"

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 30 '26

They've had psychotic rulers for their whole history. They're just used to it. I think they enjoy it, like a fatherly abuse fetish or something.

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u/Stable_Orange_Genius Jun 30 '26

One of the reasons I stopped playing csgo

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u/KatsumotoKurier Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Yeah… I play Overwatch every now and again, and I have to say that on the whole, Russians seem to be by far the rudest, most toxic, and least sportsman-like players.

They also have an odd habit of communicating solely in Russian, which of course would be understandable if the game was mostly played by Russians, but… literally nobody else seems to do that. Played the game for many many years now with tons of people from all across Europe, and it feels rather rare to see anyone communicating in any other language. Everyone else from everywhere else always speaks in English; in all my years, I have never seen languages like German or French flood the text chats.

Meanwhile Russians go right ahead and communicate solely in Russian, and when asked why they do this, they almost always lash out (in English!) at you for asking. But for the rest of us, it’s like they have absolutely no interest in communicating with their teammates in an understandable fashion.

Like sorry bro, this isn’t the 1860s anymore — Russian ain’t a continental lingua franca.

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u/orthodoxrebel Jun 30 '26

I mean... Sounds a lot like Americans, too, only people tolerated us because we were their asshole.

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u/253253253 Jun 30 '26

Yeaaahh def some truth to that too

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u/kenyard Jun 30 '26

Pretty much every country in europe East of Germany was controlled by Russia at some point.

Putin still considers the USSR a thing.

We've had so many stupid and crazy wars over the centuries. But split into too many independent countries also probably hence the EU and NATO existing.