For a lot of us, Russia and Ukraine were literally parts of the same country when we were growing up, and we used the terms Russia and the USSR pretty much interchangeably. I wasn’t aware until pretty recently that places like Baikonur, Minsk, and Chernobyl are not in Russia. Actual misdeeds committed by Russia in the Soviet era were described in vague terms and were very hard to separate from exaggerated fear mongering about communism, so I ended up knowing very little about that era. Even big things like the Holomodor were just not part of the public consciousness.

So yeah, we were very ignorant of the situation, and in many of our minds Ukraine may as well have been southwestern Russia. But those of us who aren’t idiots do at least know that the possibility of going to war with a neighboring country is inherent in the existence of separate countries, and we know from our own civil war that people of the same or similar ethnicities will absolutely go to war with each other.