Fun fact, two people, in opposition to each other, can both be assholes.

And you don’t have to like one to criticize the other.

Like how you can criticize the actions of both the USSR and the USA in the Cold War.

More importantly, you don’t have to defend one ass hole just because you like the other less.

The world ain’t fucking a dialectic.

I think the current Russian leadership has this detached fantasy of what America’s far right are like, this idea that they’re homebody rural folks who just want to keep to them selves and that if they’re in charge the US will disengage it’s self from the rest of the world, leaving Russia to treat Eastern Europe as a playground for their imperialism.

But the thing is, it ignores the agency of the eastern Europe to oppose them, and it ignores the fact that the the US far right is fundamentally narcissistic and egomaniacal. Ultimately the far right of the US will stay engaged in eastern Europe because they will perceive Russia telling them to get out as an insult and a humiliation. The only way the far right would disengage would be if they could frame it as them “winning” and that framing would be perceived as an insult and humiliation to the Russian leadership, so they won’t allow it.

So they will come to genuinely hate each other. I don’t think this will lead to the US far right suddenly deciding they care deeply about the well being of eastern Europe, but they also aren’t going to disengage completely.

I mean, I think a big part of it is foreign influence efforts landing very strongly with dissenting groups in the US. Then forging influence networks using the extant distrust for the US’s government to dismiss nuance that would paint their patrons in a bad light.

Yah, that’s why people call them tankies. Any criticism of the USSR, or even acknowledging why people criticize it, is a banable offense.

The term tankie get’s thrown around a lot, to the point of dilution, but the origin of it comes from western communist who defended the Soviet Union putting down the 1956 Hungarian revolution, notably using T-54/55 tanks. It later came to mean western communist that would ignore or downplay any criticism of the USSR, as “propaganda”. These days it could even be applied more broadly to “People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies” IE people who defended Assad and Putin.

I think hexbear fits even a fairly narrow older definition. Which is why most major instances are defederated from them.