My impression is Russia is a socially conservative place that should be the envy of American conservatives, if they could ever get their heads out of 1970's cold war thinking when us school kids had drills where we crawled under desks in case of a nuke attack (which is about the worst thing you can do in that situation, as the desks would all collapse and crush the hapless lemmings under it).
But MSM needs some external boogie man, and Russia is a logical choice. If the current woke generation would want to actually do some good in protesting conservatives, it would be in un-demonizing Russia.