They believe that Russia is inherintly Christian and especially Moscow as the third Rome. So as the battle of armagedon happens, they want to arm Russia, as to defend the holy city of Moscow against satan and his demons. For that they need a lot of weapons and especially nukes, as demons are obviously powerfull. Clearly they are also needed to fight the satanic West, approaching the holy city of Moscow via Ukraine.
And they are serious.
You can look at the thread. The initial one got a lot of replies from a “Vladimir Putin” saying “You should kill yourself NOW!”. The Git commit is even worse, with the a lot of insults. Not what usually happens on that kind of places, not that they are always kind and lovely.
Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?
Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.
So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.
There is a book about his links to Russia. So that should be possible.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2019-08-27/jeffrey-epstein-russian-ties-craig-unger