It’s not about the language per se. Yes, it’s true - people don’t choose a place of their birth. Adults, however, do choose what they do in their lives, regardless of the country of birth.
What the world expected to see from russians is massive uproar and every effort to undermine their regime. They should’ve been first in line to help Ukrainian refugees, their donations to Ukrainian army should’ve been the highest. I’m especially talking about russians living abroad. The world didn’t see it at all. There is a percentage of them who quietly state in a personal conversation that they are against khuylo and against the war. And yet very few of them do anything to dismantle their government. On top of that many people, especially those living in russia, support the big brother.
This creates a general picture of an average country representative - stupid, impotent, blood-thirsty, cowardly, corrupt, lacking integrity, slave to its dictator. Again, I’m not saying “every single one of them”, I’m saying “general big picture”.
And the language is just a marker - nothing more. It helps other people to quickly and roughly categorize others into groups. The language, on its own, is not guilty of its own existence.
Now, one may argue that it’s unfair that everyone (even the “good” people) get categorized and grouped under that average
umbrella. And I’d say it may be unfortunate, but it’s fair (or natural). It is in human nature to make categorizations.
So, in the current situation, decent people who speak russian got smeared by the majority of folks who share the same language. Now they need to go extra mile to demonstrate they are different, to show what they are doing to help, to show how much they hate their government, and how much they are not proud of their country, sport teams (state-sponsored), etc.
