

I appreciate your response, lots of interesting thoughts.
One thing I wanted to add is it’s important to realize the bias in how you measure maturity/sentience/intelligence. For example, if you measure intelligence by how well a person/species climbs a tree, a fish is dumb as a rock.
Overall, these are tough questions, that I don’t think have answers so much as maybe guidelines for making those designations. I would suggest probably erring on the side of empathy when/if anyone ever has to make these decisions.
I think it’s good that you are willing to join up if the Russians invade.
However, I don’t think “I yearn to kill people” is a good mentality to have. What happens if a war doesn’t come and you don’t have the option of killing “Russians”. What “lesser” people is that desire going to be transferred to?
I’m not saying Russia isn’t a threat or that Russian culture isn’t problematic (you can check my comment history to see I am very pro-Ukrainian). I just don’t think the desire to kill should be your motivator.
I would suggest you try and move more towards something more positive like wanting to protect others, which may happen to have you kill russians in some circumstances.
Regardless of anything above, I hope you are able to stay healthy and Russia never invades another country.