Great, now we have research on “tankies”. A word I didn’t even know until somewhat recently and have personally come to despise, as I have often seen it abused on Lemmy, along with “Russian shill”, “russobot”, “sinobot” and what have you, in attempts to discredit anyone who might say anything that is not constant political condemnation of China or Russia and respectively support for US/EU/NATO expansion. Its abuse in many ways resembles the abuse of the “antisemite” label to silence criticism of Israel, or indeed the overuse of the “fascist” label in (ultimately failed) attempts to silence the (new) right, and many other labels that unfortunately liberals among others are keen to throw around generously. It matters little what side of a debate you stand on, if you have to resort to so much name-calling to make your case. Other than that, research is fine. With the caveat that political research is, well, often political and thus not particularly immune to political bias.
Are we still going to refer to them as Putin’s puppets, when the US has been angling for a while now to become the greatest exporter of alt-right ideology? Doesn’t this detract from the fact that the US isn’t exporting democracy anymore (if it ever did) and is instead exporting its degeneration into whatever Bannon/Trump/Musk/Thiel and others want it to become?
Maybe calling them Putin’s puppets helps discredit them on US soil, but the rest of us see the US go the way of Russia and China. And a bleak future in which most of us will only get to choose between different flavors of authoritarianism…