"Vatnik" — ethnic or political slur?

Adam Taylor, Anastacia Galouchka & Heidi Levine, "Ukrainians fighting outside Bakhmut see Russian mercenaries withdrawing", Washington Post 5/282023:

“The Wagner guys have left and the [regular Russians] have come in,” said a 26-year-old commander who asked to be identified by his call sign, Chichen. He used an anti-Russian ethnic slur to refer to the troops who appear to be replacing the mercenaries […]

It's unclear whether Chichen's quote has been translated from Ukrainian. But it seems likely that the "anti-Russian ethnic slur" rendered as "[regular Russians]" was originally vatnik, and it's interesting that the authors or their editors see that word as offensive enough to warrant bowdlerization.

According to the vatnik entry at propastop:

The word took off among Russians in 2011 as part of a meme mocking jingoistic followers of Russian government propaganda. The word is derived from the name of a cotton wool jacket once worn by soldiers of the Red Army. […]

In memes first made popular by Anton Chadskiy on the Russian social network VKontakte, a vatnik is depicted in a cartoon as a person entirely made out of the padded cotton material, in an imitation of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, and often with a red nose and black eye, implying that they are prone to drunken fights.

The Wikipedia entry agrees with this history.

The propastop page goes on to explain:

It is similar to the term ‘tankie‘, which was coined during the Cold War to refer to Western supporters of authoritarian communist governments (who would always defend tanks being sent in to crush regime opponents). That term was actually coined by other Western Marxists who wanted to distance themselves from hardliners. The rise in use of ‘vatnik’ is partly due to the fact that tankie is seen as an outdated reference and is too limited to insulting people on the far left. While Russia remains an authoritarian agressor, it is of course no longer communist and those who repeat its propaganda can come from across the political spectrum. As a result, those who would previously refer to tankies are now often replacing it with ‘vatnik’.

In response, there appears to have been a concerted effort to redefine ‘vatnik’ by supporters of the Russian government. The Wikipedia page for vatnik has been frequently edited this year to describe it as an ‘ethnic slur’ in the opening line, despite the rest of the page contradicting that definition by explaining its real origins and use as a political pejorative. At least one user who made this edit has also erroneously amended other Wikipedia pages to reflect Russian government narratives.

In any case, it seems unlikely that Chichen was using vatnik to mean "Russian", since the Wagner mercenaries replaced by the "vatniks" were also Russians.

Rather, since a vatnik was originally a cotton-padded army jacket, Chichen's usage was more probably like calling American army soldiers "G.I.'s", or British soldiers "redcoats" — though certainly with a pejorative tinge, given the word's recent history.  So would the Post have censored the word vatnik if they saw it as a pejorative metonymy for "Russian soldier", or as a pejorative term for a political group? Or was their concern due to the fact that there's an on-going attempt to portray the word as an ethnic slur?

Of course, this is taking place against the backdrop of a general tendency to shift taboos from body-wastes/sex/religion to ethnicity — see e.g. Rachel Hall, "Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language", The Guardian 3/25/2023. That article makes the interesting point that the "potentially offensive language" includes essentially all ethnic and many physical descriptions, not just those expressed using offensive terms.

I haven't seen any attempt to make political slurs taboo, to the point of editing quotations to replace terms like "lib", "RINO", "MAGAt" with square-bracketed euphemisms. But maybe I just haven't noticed.