How terrifying that sneaky Russians are able to effect arbitrary social change by just throwing $100k of FB ads at the problem! I thought I was a moderately intelligent and well-informed person, but after reading your comment, I now understand that no amount of reason or self-awareness can protect me from miniscule amounts of ad spend by foreign spies.
The point is that they're well-educated themselves, persistent, and capable of learning from their mistakes. Earlier attempts were childishly bad. The contemporary ones are better-crafted, and may not be reaching you--I don't know you and can't speak to that--but they are reaching people I know and care about.
Can you rule out that those people they are supposedly reaching don't simply have different values than you and you're currently seeing circumstances that make them alter their stance because it hits a fault line between your values and theirs?
Not entirely, no--arguably we may have similar values, in a sense, but (and this is where the guesswork comes in) may have arrived at them via different paths. I'll posit that the path matters, a lot.
The people in question are current students at my alma mater, where I studied, among other things, Russian language and the former Soviet Union. Some in the current class are likely studying the same, but most aren't, and even those that are, well, they're just starting to study it.
Again--no certainties there, but while I received a fairly decent US high school education, coverage of the cultural and political history of the former Soviet Union is limited by necessity--there's just not enough time to slot that in among everything else US high schoolers are expected to learn.
My gut feeling is that if I'm seeing them share this sort of content, that it's reaching them organically, not because they're finding it after a long time studying the whole of the space over a decade of hobby interest--that's where I'm coming from. The end viewpoints and values may have similarities, but they will be colored by many other factors, and those factors matter.
If that intuition is right, while we may share views in some sense, their view is quite possibly being shaped by actors whose intent is to shape it in a particular direction, who recognize that there are avenues to do so (the amplification/radicalization potential of internet content rabbit holes is well-documented at this point), and who aren't really interested in building a nuanced perspective grounded in mutual understanding of both FSU and American history.
Intuitively, based on their past actions, those actors want the opposite: to (skillfully, mind you) leverage their own nuanced understanding to craft a shallow, targeted narrative that's believable enough, with the primary goal of supporting their own agenda and political goals, not with the goal of building a strong basis of mutual understanding across borders. Is trying to reason about those aims hard, to the point of being nearly impossible to get right? Yes! Entirely! But I don't think the response warranted is "well, it's hard, we should all give up and just see what happens". We must try to instead do the best we can, both in our words and actions in a given moment and with an expectation that we won't be entirely on the mark always, but that we can and should try to watch for our mistakes and catch them as early as we can--that is how we improve and help one another.
So, to sum up, can I rule that out definitively? No. Can I make what I think is a reasonable assessment of what's going based on the information available to me and my own background of knowledge, and recognition of what's changed in the world since I made a similar journey? Hopefully, albeit worryingly, yes. I therefore think it's important to not abdicate any notion of responsibility or to call it a day and agree to disagree on a lot of the nuance--doing so tacitly grants one sort of nuance authority, and the intent behind it may not be entirely benign--historically, it hasn't, and an about face seems unlikely at this time.
