Nice. Being against Russia is now Russophobia.
It's easy to be dismissive about propaganda from the outside, but the thing is it makes a lot of sense from within. This is the main news source, people tend to trust the news groups they grew up with, independent of actual merit. With the advent of social media, okay, people get information from outside - and they see our election cycles, campaigns of misinformation, propaganda, over-the-top accusations and sensationalising, so much so that it's hard to sort between the legitimate and the illegitimate. Then you have bitter infighting over topics like "Is mass-death from a pandemic a good thing?" Or QAnon cults.
If you have begun to doubt the news that you were used to, how would you find accurate information in among all that?
And then you have the genuine dumb stuff. With the sanctions, bloody OnlyFans has shut down service in Russia. I'm sure Putin was making a lot of money on
that site. You have a lot of performative rubbish, not meant for the benefit of Russia, but for propaganda back home, or people that do things just because they can. Stop trading oil, weapons, and keep food and hobbies ongoing. Anything else fails to hit Putin and the war effort, and just hits the locals, and makes them see the West as the russophobic mess they're told it is.
I know someone in Russia. They generally work by commission, including with a mostly-international audience. They protested the war, got thrown in jail for a night, got out with a fine, and then everything from paypal to patreon stopped funding them so suddenly they can no longer make a living. For a lot of people, that would stoke bitterness, even justify it, and propaganda isn't even involved - it's direct experience with what our leaders are doing. I am pretty sure the Russian army isn't on Patreon. Then you have people suddenly being wary of any vaguely slavic names, restaurants, people (including, you know,
Ukrainians) and all the overplayed memeing about Russian bots. Russian IPs getting their social media randomly deleted for fear of being bots, limiting contact with the outside world.
Objections to Putin aren't Russophobia, but the fact is we do tend to give him a lot of ammunition.