JFC being implicitly in favour of a powerful military occupying and bombing its weaker neighbour is not an edgy or contrarian or clever position. It's ethical bankruptcy.
I strongly believe there are several key factors to this: a similar cultural experience and societal identity for people over 50[1] and a strong influence stemming from the combination of only knowing Russian as their single foreign language and the prevalence of Russian TV channels in the 90s/00s as well as Russian YouTube channels more recently. The 90s were hard in post-soviet countries, many people got disillusioned, some never really got back on their feet.
In terms of misremembering the occupation: cognitive biases and flaws[2], nostalgia, regressively conservative, hyper nationalistic, as well as anti-US/Western sentiments, etc. are all abused by Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. Some narratives are really textbook political myths[3] about the Savior, the Golden Age (I guess the US got a real taste of this one with the MAGA movement). Much like a significant number of Trump supporters in the US, supporters or Russia in my country are more likely to believe in chemtrails, sovereign citizen claims, global pedophile conspiracies, anti-LGBTQ narratives, etc.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus 2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect 3- http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/pas/pas201201/pas2012-08.pdf
By using the word „misremembering“ you only show the misunderstanding of real experiences of people which lived in that period. They may have experienced oppression, but it could be subtle and perceived very differently. Those people are not necessary living better now, often on the contrary. Transition to capitalism has left many behind, and being old, poor and misunderstood is certainly felt worse today than being young and not being able to buy American jeans back then. Calling it a false memory is intellectual snobbery.
Or were you trying to make some sort of point about the differences in the repressive mechanisms or social constraints established under Khrushchev vs Brezhnev?
THE FUCKING RUSSIANS WERE OCCUPYING YOU A COUPLE DECADES AGO, IT WAS NOT A GOOD TIME, HOW DO YOU NOT REMEMBER THIS?!?!?!
fwiw I would say the plurality of people are in support of Ukraine but I never imagined there would so much visible support for russia, or even concessions to russian aggression. It's very disheartening to see any question about the validity of Ukrainian sovereignty.