History of Vatniks is as follows:
For decades Russia was the Big Bad Bear that the US far (and centre) right hated and feared. But
after the Fall of the USSR, Russia changed a lot. It went from hardline Soviet communism to a brief false spring of liberalization and normalization, which withered away when the Russian Mafiya managed to get their hands on almost all the state-owned resources (practically everything) and consolidate their rule as oligarchs. This is when Putin (ex KGB guy) came to power. He established a right-wing autocracy with an official State church (Russian Orthodox) which is the kind of government that right-wingers prefer.
So the rightwing oligarchs in the US, who are the backers/funders of the
Republican party, now admire this new Russia. They admire its homophobia, its ethnic nationalism, its theocratic tendencies, its inequity, its rejection of the Soviet ideals of gender and race equality, and above all its fake democracy in which a dictator owns the media, the police, and a private army so as to crush all dissent and elections are a farce. Ron de Santis would just love to be Putin, Trump openly expressed his admiration for Putin. Russia, once the world centre of the Communist
International, is now the world centre of the New Far Right
International.
If Trump was still president America would be supplying arms to Russia.
