This is where you are wrong; there is plenty of reason to dehumanize and cast outside human norms the Russian populace as things currently stand.
This is not going to be a short war, and the less the general populace of western nations view Russians as 'just other people like them', even when those people support the current invasion, the faster support and aid to Ukraine will flow.
As well, shifting the general western populace towards viewing Russians in general as a threat to be contained militarily, not negotiated with or appeased, makes it far harder for Russia to pull anything else on any of it's other neighbors.
I'm curious if you would be willing to extend the same line of thinking to the populations of other interesting places, like North Korea, China, Iran, Yemen, Palestine and Syria.
Of course it is long overdue for western populations to realize that non-western people obviously not "just other people like them", they are slightly or not so slightly different people in fact.
Russians, Iranians, Arabs, North Koreans and the like, are people who have spent more or less decades worked on by one or another kind of very far reaching, society dominating ideological hegemony of some rather unsavory by western standards government, obviously this shit has to have some effect, if it didn't, no one would be doing it anymore considering how many times it was done by how many rulers.
Consider the whole hoopla about post-WW2 denazification, and that's only with the NSDAP being in charge of German society for what, 12 years? Those are rookie numbers compared to all the abovementioned in terms of grand influence on a nation's culture and customs.
People like Solzhenitsyn have noticed a century ago such a characteristic among Russian population nearly a century ago already.
At its peak from the 1920s to the 1950s, the Soviet gulag system imprisoned millions of people.
allthatsinteresting.com
In any case, Soviet society certainly wasn't ready to closely examine what had happened during the height of the gulags. When Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago, one of the first publicized accounts of the horrors of the gulag, in 1973, he lost his Soviet citizenship and was forced to flee the country. Solzhenitsyn didn't return until 1994, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family?" Solzhenitsyn famously demanded in his explosive work.
"Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?"
Sounds familiar? The heavy handed Tsarist rule has trained its people right the way it wanted - to shut the hell up and do what they're told, none of the protesting and rebelling shit some other nations practice, and all its successor states see great utility in continuing and improving upon such implanted culture of fear and passivity.
In a not so unlikely scenario a similar situation happens with Iran, China or North Korea, we will be asking the same questions.
Containing Russia's madness to their own borders is going to be a matter of survival for more than just Ukraine, going into the future.
Anyone who borders Russia, which includes the US (Alaska says hi), should operate under the assumption that Russia will only get more belligerent, more desiring of imperial glory, not less, even after they lose their invasion in Ukraine,
You can call it morally repugnant and gross to take this view of Russia and the Russian people, unless you are actively fighting them like Ukraine, at this stage, if you want to continue to think 'moral superiority' matters worth a damn when dealing with Russian public or state opinion.
I'm taking the view that I am because I do not foresee a thawing of relations with Russia in our lifetimes, after what they have done in Ukraine and will likely continue to try to do elsewhere after the long drawn out fight to remove Russian forces from Ukraine. Therefore, I do not see the long term reasoning of trying to keep Russian's 'humanity' in the minds of the western public, rather than rhetoric and plans based on containment and educated distrust of anything any Russian says to someone in the west about anything.
Not with the current establishment at least. But regardless of that, well, think again if you are willing to go so far against all the other peoples with very odious by western standards customs and governments, including views on matters of war, rulership and violence in pursuit of those. Rather than picking out this one problem bunch for dehumanization, i'd rather say that the western public should take this as a reminder that platitudes about common humanity, no matter how often, loudly and sincerely repeated, in no way pose some sort of idealistic example that everyone will feel compelled to copy, in fact to some such unwillingness to swing a big stick at societies who are clearly out of line, even if poor and historically unfortunate, only encourages further transgressions supported with a sense of impunity among the observers, including some fairly strong and ambitious ones, who in turn proceed to push the lines further.
Or in other words, various stupid laws, ideas and compromises of old made in the name of more often than not leftist ideals need to either go, or at least have major, common sense "self-preservation and security" carve-outs, starting with the weird obsession about disarmament treaties, diplomat's wishful thinking, and insanity hiding under the cover of "human rights" in matters of not controlling illegal immigration in most of the West, not to mention the pyramids of delusions built around the concept of global citizenship, instead of just excepting Russians and Russia from them.
And China will be watching what, if anything, we do about these things - if we let the wretches and barbarians of the world get away with crazy shit and no more than a gentle tap in return, aspiring world powers like Russia and China can only wonder how far can they go before they will get a meaningful pushback from us.
