Notes

How Do Russians Feel About a War With Ukraine?
But even though justification of the Ukraine invasion can be found among Russians, there have been no demonstrations of support. It’s sunny, people are taking selfies on Red Square, while a long convoy of National Guard buses rolls by the Kremlin walls. Gudkov says that the number of Russians who reject the Ukraine war has remained stable at 18-22%. That number consists of many young Russians and slightly more women than men.


Romanovsky is also concerned about young Russian scientists who are important to the future of climate research in the region. "Eventually, I believe that we will be able to communicate openly again." "In the past – like, Soviet Union past – the data from this part of the world was also limited," says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who trained in Moscow. In the mid-1970s, young scientists had virtually no contact with western collaborators, he remembers. For Russian climate scientists who started their careers in the Soviet Union, the current situation can feel eerily familiar.

Kira*, 20, Moscow – ‘I don’t want to live in isolation here’
But this week, after several television appearances by Mr. Putin stunned and scared some longtime observers, that sense of casual disregard turned to a deep unease. MOSCOW — Waiting for her friends on Moscow’s primly landscaped Boulevard Ring earlier this week, Svetlana Kozakova admitted that she’d had a sleepless night. She kept checking the news on her phone after President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggrieved speech to the nation on Monday that all but threatened Ukraine with war. The longer the war drags on, the deeper the human and economic toll in Russia, which will almost invariably impact public opinion, Botchkovar says. His speech comes after weeks of speculation over whether the Kremlin would seize the occasion to announce an escalation in the war, says Mai’a Cross, Edward W. Brooke Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Northeastern. Russian President Vladimir Putin used the national Russian holiday commemorating Nazi Germany’s defeat at the end of World War II to demonize the West, suggesting it is responsible for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

I really cannot understand why Russians don’t have the right to eat in McDonald’s. Russian military enlistment offices have been attacked 220 times since the war in Ukraine began, Moscow’s interior ministry has said. Now, I’m very encouraged by the fact that the world understands that the Russian people did not choose this war, that instead it was started by a president who lives in some absurd reality of his own.
Russian Ministry of Defence spokesman Igor Konashenkov told reporters that Russian forces were indeed mounting a counteroffensive and attacks would target military sites. St Petersburg, Russia – On Thursday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his armed forces were launching a massive operation against Ukraine, sending frightened Kyiv residents into underground stations for shelter. While dissenting voices to Putin’s invasion are minimised in Russia, the scale and the intensity of the feeling of support for Ukraine means that the opposition cannot be entirely silenced by the Kremlin. There has been a raft of sanctions imposed on Russia and on Russian citizens in the past week in response to President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

'It's been a long time coming'
One and a half years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, support for the war, as well as President Vladimir Putin, has remained consistent among people in Russia. Since Russia annexed Ukraine's southern Crimea peninsula and backed militants in the eastern Donbas region in 2014, there's been no real let-up in fighting, cyber-attacks and misinformation. Ilya (name changed), who is in his early 30s, has just finished paying off his mortgage in Moscow.

At the start of 2022 one dollar traded for about 75 roubles and a euro for 80. "I always pay with my phone but it simply didn't work. There were some other people with the same problem. It turned out that the barriers are operated by VTB bank which is under sanctions and cannot accept Google Pay and Apple Pay. From fleeting impressions and conversations it is hard to draw firm conclusions. Their town has been directly affected, so we are worried about them. He says about 50% have "definite support" without any qualms, but the other 30% have support with reservations.
A just-released poll by Russia’s Levada Center shows that Russians think the most hostile countries are the United States, followed by Ukraine, Germany, Latvia, and Lithuania. Russians believe the official propaganda that there was a “democratic referendum” in Crimea, that Ukrainians shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, that there is a civil war in Ukraine, and that there are no Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Two-thirds of Ukrainians, but only a quarter of Russians, understand the conflict as a Russian-Ukrainian war. Not surprisingly, the major shift in opinion took place after 2014.

Tatyana*, 28, from Moscow, currently in Germany – ‘My parents can justify the war in their heads. I can’t understand why’
Mostly because I don’t understand how anyone could take this step – to send people to fight, to kill others. “I’m scared and hurt for my friends in Ukraine, who write to me ‘we’re going down into the bomb shelter’. The war in eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea. Next, two separatist regions in Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk, declared their independence from Kyiv. It sparked a conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists, which has seen casualties on both sides. Though the percentage of those able to get around censored and blocked social networks and consume news online rose from about 6% to 22% within the first few months of the war, it has not risen further.

People who are from disadvantaged groups are suffering the most, he adds, because they don't have the resources to adapt. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the older generation is drowning in propaganda and believes that Putin’s actions are justified. Millions of Russians like him are starting to feel the effect of Western economic sanctions designed to punish the country for invading neighbouring Ukraine. Additionally, data suggests that up to 30% of Russians say they’re not closely following the situation in Ukraine, she says. But, at the same time, I can understand why this might seem like sophistry to Ukrainians who have lost their homes, their friends, and seen their fellow Ukrainians tortured and murdered. However, outside these pro-government circles, the latest actions by the Russian military have considerably less support.
Ukraine cannot expect peace with Russia if it is not willing to give up Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, Robert Fico has said ahead of a meeting with prime minister Denys Shmyhal on Wednesday. “Ukraine has achieved this because it has largely prevented the Russian Black Sea Fleet from operating in the western Black Sea, where it is held at risk by Ukrainian missiles and uncrewed surface vessels,” it said. Ukrainian agricultural exports surged in December after it successfully forced Russia out of the western half of the Black Sea, Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated claims made by the region’s Moscow-appointed governor that Ukraine was responsible for the attack, which wounded 20 others.

Only 10-12% of people surveyed by the Levada Center, many of them civil servants and members of the middle class, were aware of this connection. That tendency, forged in the Soviet period, only intensified in recent weeks, with new laws that criminalized “discrediting” the Russian military, spreading “fake news,” and making any mention in the press that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was war. "We're having a meeting at the end of February," he says, "and it's basically Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia. There's no one from Russia coming." In addition, drafted Russian soldiers, as well as contracted ones, now receive much more pay. Meanwhile, Putin’s repeated claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” left no room for a Ukrainian identity other than that of “little Russians” in his Eurasian Union.
As publishing "any news about Russian losses is absolutely forbidden," not even death toll figures can change Russian public opinion, Gudkov said. In an April 2022 interview with DW, Gudkov said he expected the attitude of Russians towards the war would drastically change if the country is defeated or if fighting drags on and fatality figures rise. Even those who did agree to answer the questions in Miniailo’s survey displayed a heightened level of fear and discomfort.


We have VK (a Russian substitute for Facebook), but it’s not the same. It was rather cheap, but now I want to buy AirPods and they’re really expensive. They were 7,000 roubles and now cost more than 14,000 roubles. My sister was struggling to get baby products for my nephew because the prices skyrocketed. One of my brothers-in-law and my father will potentially lose their jobs because their businesses worked very closely with European businesses, and all of those lines of communication are closed off now.

As for me, personally, I lost the opportunity to move into my own apartment, which I was supposed to do soon because the renovations became too expensive. Because of this, I will have to live for a long time in a place where I’m not very comfortable. My feelings are mixed regarding the decision of our president. I got a government email saying that we had until March 14 to download all files from Instagram.


Western powers are unwilling to send troops to fight in the conflict but have sought to make the Kremlin’s actions unsustainable with tough economic punishments. Ukrainians held a positive view of the Russian people throughout this period and only turned against the Russian state and its president in 2014 in response to Putin’s aggression. As https://click4r.com/posts/g/14651300/ has written, “In getting Crimea, Putin has lost Ukraine.” Putin’s war will only end when this fact is finally realized in Moscow.

She supports our president, despite the fact that her whole family is still over there. When I hear it from Ukrainian people, I begin to doubt that our president’s strategy is wrong. Maybe Putin and his people know more and it’s really all justified. He says the firm asks about peoples' feelings, and is seeing that both groups — those who support and oppose the military's actions — are anxious and afraid. He contrasts this to public opinion surrounding the annexation of Crimea in 2014, recalling that there were positive feelings and even "euphoria" at the time.

Read More: https://click4r.com/posts/g/14651300/