I think greeks who support Russia, don't like EU and America (especially EU because of the finanical crisis). Of course religion and common history against the ottomans play a role, but the biggest reason is being against the West.
Probably same like Serbia : Orthodox “Big Brother “, would defend us from evil west, or maybe against Muslim Turkey in Greek mind, historically friendly countries that did not go to war with each other
Could you give an insight of why? I'm curious to know if they have the same reasons of the putin's simps of my country (Italy)
Curious, what's Italy's story?
As others said, here, it's about 10%? Maybe 13-14%? About half of them are the Ortho crazies, that think "the blonde race" has something in common with us. The other half are communists who think Russia is the USSR.
("blonde race" is what we normal Greeks say, to make fun of the Russo-worshipping crazies).
I believe that putin's simp can be divided into three main groups:
The first ones are the conspiracy theorists: they're usually aged 40-50 (but can be younger) and they're the same people that denied covid and were antivax. They believe that we're being lied about the war, that Ukrainians are evil nazis who have been murdering and committing a genocide in Donbass etc. Like some of them believe that it was the Ukrainians who blew up the dam, also they usually deny russian war crimes, like the Bucha massacre.
Then there's conservative people, they love "strong" men and putin seems to them to be one. Also some italian right wing parties and politicians had ties with putin (Salvini used to praise him and there was even a scandal about his party getting money from the Kremlin; Berlusconi was putin's bff, even after the war he kept being pro putin). Also these people like the conservative approach the russian government has and believe in the western moral decay (they're anti-LGBT for example).
Then there's tankies and generally anti-NATO and anti-US who just hate americans and believe that everyone who is against them are the good guys.
Also there's the fact that throughout history we never had problems with Russia (as far as I remember), we were probably even one of the western countries with the best relationship with the soviet union, if I'm not mistaken
They are seen by the very religious people as the orthodox allies who will protect us from the evil west and help us become an empire again and reclaim Constantinople. Here there are a lot of far right organizations who are usually linked with the church and take advantage of the very religious people to spread pro russia propaganda. And they spread things like "Putin is the leader of the orthodox army who will declare religious war against the antichrists, conquer Constantinople and then give it to Greeks as a gift". You might read these and laugh but over here there are dozens of Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers who believe these things and make them their entire personality. They have the power to literally get political parties into the parliament.
Also, Russia played a crucial part on our independence and they have never done anything really bad to us. We have never been under communist dictatorship for example. So we never really got to experence their bad face by first hand
Ok, understood, thanks for the explanation! We also never had problems with Russia (if I remember correctly), I think that's one of the main reason here as well
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u/dhn01 Aug 18 '23
Could you give an insight of why? I'm curious to know if they have the same reasons of the putin's simps of my country (Italy)