My instinct when I think about some country like Bangladesh is that those who side with Russia aren’t signing up to something like, “Russia has the right to its war because Ukraine is really Russia/Russia has the right to invade whomever it wants” or that kind of thing, but more thinks “We’re broadly for Russia and against the West, so Russia winning and the West losing is good for us.”

That then leads me to think: how much of my country’s siding with Ukraine is the same but flipped: “Russia is our enemy from the cold war, if not before, so Russia losing is good for us.”

But I think it would be difficult to sustain a pro-Russian perspective if you got much of the reporting that we do about daily civilian deaths from the bombardment of Ukrainian cities. That then makes me wonder how much those countries’ media makes of Ukrainian attacks on Russia. I can imagine that if you didn’t really follow the war closely, so you don’t remember that Ukraine started off only just about able to repel a massive invasion, you could think that Ukraine’s attacks are unjustified or even atrocities.