Well, I'm not a Republican and I don't fear Russians to begin with, but I do see what you mean. It's a change from how it was when I was a kid and the cold war was still going on. But then Russia has changed quite a bit since then, too. Some people say it is backsliding into being a repressive, authoritarian state, but I don't know. That's true of lots of places that we're already allied with that didn't even have to backslide first to be described in those terms (basically all of the Arab Gulf states, a lot of Latin America, Turkey, etc). So it may seem more strange coming from Republicans since they were/are traditionally much harder on Russia (due to fear of "commies", I guess, even though Russia hasn't been communist in decades, and we do just fine business with communist Vietnam now), but there is a certain internal logic to it: Republicans, being more conservative, can tend to favor more authoritarian figures so long as they too are conservative (so Pinochet good or at least tolerable, but Castro bad). This is just like how liberals/left-wing people were once identified with anarchists like Emma Goldman (who famously quipped "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution",
or something similar) but today seem to be nervous about allowing people the level of freedom necessary to speak their minds and live as wish if that would violate established leftist 'orthodoxy':
Again, what a bunch of idiots.
Literally the only thing I have learned from paying attention to politics is that
everyone is an idiot.