American Vatnik X

My countrymen are a bunch of fucking Russians

I do need to be clear about one thing before we start. “Vatnik” gets used interchangeably with “Russian” these days but it does actually have a definition. It was a pejorative term frequently used in the post-Soviet sphere to describe jingoistic followers of Russian propaganda.

In the contemporary usage this does genuinely describe a very large swath of Russian society. They may not be rabidly jingoistic but Russians are largely supportive of the invasion of Ukraine because it has personally impacted them minimally, I have previously discussed this at length in the context of Russian mobilization.

This is an imperial mindset. The war is “over there” and it’s not their problem and when the war does come home in the form of casualties or the occasional drone flyby, it’s an annoyance and an inconvenient reminder that those pesky little people have the audacity to resist and they could just become subjects and end all of their suffering and make this inconvenience go away.

This may seem very far away even with America’s new administration but Trump 2.0 wasted no time in engaging in delusions of imperial grandeur with his inaugural address referring to taking back the Panama Canal and explicitly using the phrase “manifest destiny.”

The administration has also discussed taking Greenland, military operations in Mexico (with the 82nd Airborne beginning preparations to deploy to the Southern border today) or annexing the entirety of Canada.¹ As of recently, it has been reported that the Danish prime minister had a phone call with Donald Trump and Trump was very serious in his intention to take Greenland such that it has shaken many European leaders. Mexico, who has found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration over immigration and a completely fucking stupid idea that drug cartels can be dismantled by “doing a Sicario” refused to accept a US deportation flight earlier today. Canada, in response to rumblings of the Trump administration implementing tariffs² with one of our closest trading partners, has signaled willingness to engage in retaliatory tariffs.

The last of those brings me to why I am absolutely losing it on my fellow countrymen.

The response of many Americans to the idea that Canada could retaliate with tariffs of their own is confused shock. As this thread on Bluesky from Sharon Kuruvilla demonstrates, the response of most Americans to the idea that someone might fight back is slack-jawed bewilderment that other people might want to see them suffer as we will make them.

I understand that this is Tiktok but this is genuinely how many Americans view other countries inconveniencing us by responding to our own actions. (Trade) War is something that happens over there, it doesn’t impact us beyond occasionally someone from your high school coming home in a casket draped with a flag, but for the people that we bring war to, it is unimaginable pain and suffering that Americans have never experienced firsthand.

Americans and Russians are really not so different in this aspect. We are both content to let the imperial wars we wage fade into background noise while we kill people over there. We did this with Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians did it with Crimea and the War in Donbas and they’d like to keep doing it but tenacious Ukrainian defense that extracts a tremendous toll of blood and a strategic bombing campaign that makes it impossible.

A common retort from Americans is “I didn’t vote for him, why should I suffer?” and this is an abdication of collective responsibility.

We might be a lot like Russians but America is not Russia. We have free elections, we have freedom of speech, we have freedom of assembly. We do not have a state security service that targets dissidents as the Russians do. We also do not have a society that has been subject to the same kind of atomization that Russian society has. Acting like Russians in this context is a disgrace.

Many Americans like to posture about how they protested the Iraq War in 2003 and how that should absolve them of sin. But the question that should follow is “where were you in 2004? Or 2006? 2008? 2010?” This may be an unreasonable standard of collective responsibility but it is not an incorrect one and my fellow countrymen can’t even seem to make it to 2003.

Indifference to our export of violence and suffering while simultaneously being shocked and confused that someone would dare retaliate for having that foisted on them is vatnik behavior.

This is also before we discuss how many Americans have responded to Trump’s imperial delusions with jokes and discussions of how this will actually be a positive for American politics because they do not know anyone who has experienced the violence that invasion and occupation can unleash.

These people will also inevitably deflect from any criticism of this rhetoric with some form of the schrodinger’s douchebag argument in which they were simultaneously joking but also you’re a hysterical dweeb for thinking it will happen or that I was serious.

I understand irony-poisoning is the new cool thing because showing that you care about your fellow humans is cringe but this is not something that should be joked about and it is especially not something that should be joked about given our current administration. I have seen Americans say (claiming this to be in jest) that “Canadians have no real culture” or “Canada wasn’t a sovereign country until the 80s” which may seem to be a stupid joke but this is also how you normalize the invasion, occupation, and forced assimilation of another nation.

“We are brotherly peoples, what’s really going to change for you?” is a genuinely repulsive statement because Russia’s genocide of Ukrainians is based on that exact idea. “We are the same (Russian), we will kill you if you disagree.”

If you spent any significant amount of time on Twitter since the Russian invasion, you’d probably have seen at least one instance of Americans of all political affiliations bemoaning Russian conscripts (who aren’t actually conscripts) being wasted by Ukrainian drones and calling anyone engaging in schadenfreude a disgusting freak.

This is imperial sympathy. A manifestation of Americans subconsciously realizing how much they have in common with Russians.

Americans instinctually sympathize with Russian invaders more than they do with Ukrainian defenders because foreign imperial wars are what American military policy in the 21st century is known for. Americans don’t remember a time when they had to fight to defend their friends and family from an invader who wished to slaughter them and take their homes. Even when we fought just wars, they were wars overseas. Americans sympathize with the Russian mobik making the sign of the cross before a grenade is dropped on him after a failed attempt to storm a treeline because they can more easily imagine a shell hole like that being their final resting place and the guy defending his home being death manifest.

Maybe we are just a bunch of fucking Russians and we haven’t realized it yet.

1. I would strongly recommend against dismissing this as the most powerful man in the world engaging in “we do a little trolling.” James discusses this dynamic in his own piece.

2. Trump quite literally believes that tariffs are a thing you do that makes other countries give you free money so other presidents are stupid for not doing it. Most Americans probably agree.