Very strange since their teachers/parents/older siblings should know better. I've been reading a lot of Paul Robinson's stuff regarding Russia. He asserts that the threats we're seeing are inflated and that Russia's "aggression" is just a big misunderstanding of the Russian mentality. Though, the latter is more a response to an "Orthodox jihad" claim that I'd never heard of.In the most recent study conducted in October and November 1986, responses to questionnaires from 3,372 Maryland teenagers (average age 14.5 years) were compared to 2,263 similarly aged (average age 13 years) Russian children from the Tambov and Rostov provinces. About three-quarters of those interviewed from each nation agreed: "There can be no winners in a nuclear war since most countries would be totally destroyed." But 56 percent of Russian teenagers thought a nuclear war would never happen, while only 14 percent of Americans thought so.
I'm a little bit skeptical of robinson's argument. It sounds a lot like the multicultural based argument that is sometimes made vis-a-vis human rights that morality isn't absolute and that each culture has a different moral stance. What Putin is doing is in many aspects wrong objectively speaking. That doesn't mean I know what we should do about it, but he is certainly doing more than asserting independence. He is running a kleptocracy, and consolidating power for himself at the expense of sovereignty, and he is adding nothing to the world community of nations.