> How do large numbers of people suddenly come to adopt the same view on an issue that, until recently, no one cared about.

Still true in the current regime. I remember that about 2 days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, all my Russian acquaintances, who didn't know each other, respond with "what about Yugoslavia?!"[1] to my inquiries. Yugoslavia? Most of these people are too young to remember Yugoslavia, but I guess that's what Russian media told them to think.

Btw this phenomenon is not exclusive of Russia either. The USA also has a lot of it, unfortunately.

[1] NATO bombed Belgrade when Serbia threatened with ethnic cleaning in Kosovo. The rationale being that if NATO bombed someone then it's ok for Russia to invade and bomb Ukraine, I guess...?

> The USA also has a lot of it, unfortunately.

Like tons of American citizens suddenly becoming experts on Ukrainian history or inflation theory. Oh well. It's probably a lot worse in Russia.

Uh, the US bombed so many places, of course young people can’t remember all of them. Meanwhile people who live nearby those places actually know about them.

There's more to it than that though. Aside from global insularity, Americans have an extremely short psychological conception of history.

One of the reasons Russians remember history is they have a lot more of it. When your civilization is 1100 years old and a cultural descendant of the Byzantine Empire, your ideas around what to remember are significantly different than an American. People who care about The Current Thing™ or what one of the Kardashian sisters is doing at a given moment aren't going to even have the proper resolution or framing to think that way.

> aren't going to even have the proper resolution or framing to think that way.

Possibly for the best. The revanchist sentiment that comes from admiration of and longing for a fallen empire is a toxin on our species.

The Russian speaking news sphere has been super mad about Kosovo for years, this isn't a new thing invented for the invasion.

The conflict in Kosovo is literally what restarted active US-Russian Cold War, and very nearly direct armed conflict.

Russia gonna Russia, and they have a long history of reaching for whataboutism to justify whatever they're doing. Back in the USSR days it was "and in your country they lynch negroes!": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

The thing with whataboutism is that (besides obviously just a trick to swamp discussion about any topic) is that even if you take it as face value it's often dishonestly out of proportion. Sure NATO did bomb Serbia and a lot of civilians were killed but how does that justify killing an order of magnitude more civilians in Ukraine (and counting)?

And if you want go down the whataboutistic rabbit hole, someone will bring up that Serbia played a major role in other conflicts of the yugoslav wars and that NATO was just reacting to a decade of calls for "why isn't the west doing anything to stop this?"

The thing that enables this sort of atrocities is not considering your target as fully human. American's way of coping with that is that they think most of the world is just a primitive shithole. Russian's way of dealing with Ukraine is that of saying that Ukraine just doesn't exist, that it's just a fake simulacrum of mother Russia, that its people are just jokes.

This setup helps fueling the asymmetric situation where grievances on your side are amplified and those in the other side trivialized.

> Sure NATO did bomb Serbia and a lot of civilians were killed but how does that justify killing an order of magnitude more civilians in Ukraine (and counting)?

Because it justifies the Kremlin's elaborate conspiracy theory that says the US fomented a coup on their border in order to put hostile neo-nazi russophobes into power in order to divide and conquer. Intervention in Serbia, seen as within their sphere of influence, is used as one piece of evidence in support of this conspiracy theory. Basically, they intervened in our perceived affairs before, therefore < conspiracy theory > is true.

And it was "their affairs" because Serbia is their ally or because the whole eastern block is by definition sacrosanct Russian sphere of influence?

Probably both, and it was done at a moment of maximum weakness in post-Soviet Russia with little to no consultation or involvement with Russia. It would've been a moment of humiliation for the nationalist and imperialist types.