Dear all, please remember that engaging with trolls can get you banned (rule of thumb, half the time the offender gets for themselves)
Write what you want others to read, I don't care if there are disagreements. But go get a private chat room if you want to exchange insults with them :)
Go for it. That's one of the benefits of being FOSS, and other countries have their own versions of Linux already (that meet whatever dumb authoritarian rules are required).
Comrade, we have created Vatnix, is great success! Will do all of your online banking for you, and host lots of friendly viruses! In the event of American invasion, it will run script which causes computer to explode, safeguarding APT29 source code.
Oh man I fucking called this one, as soon as I read that article a few days ago saying that the Russian maintainers were removed from the kernel, I'm like man if Russia was smart right now they would do a country-funded version, this is completely legal as well under the licensing of the current kernel.
I would be very surprised if such a fork would diverge from Linux. I would guess that this would be little more than a branch with (most likely) support for Russian hardware. Just my hunch.
A legitimate hard fork doesn't seem particularly smart to me, but what do I know...