Notes

Ukraine war: Why so many Russians turn a blind eye to the conflict
“It’s not about having to reconsider this one event but everything you thought and understood over the last ten or fifteen years,” Volkov told me. 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. I want peace, but my grandmother thinks our military is needed to protect Russians in eastern Ukraine. 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.


Ilya (name changed), who is in his early 30s, has just finished paying off his mortgage in Moscow. "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. Like other interviewees for this article we are not using his full name or showing his face for security reasons. "I am scared here - people have been arrested for speaking against 'the party line'. I feel ashamed and I didn't even vote for those in power." Millions of Russians like him are starting to feel the effect of Western economic sanctions designed to punish the country for invading neighbouring Ukraine. "The rouble (Russia's currency) will fall and people will have it really bad. So this must be avoided. It is not people's fault, but it will be ordinary people who will be hit," he said.

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Putin’s authoritarian and great power nationalistic regime fanned ethnic Russian nationalism, turning Russians against both the Ukraine state and Ukrainians as a people. 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. Putin’s total control of the Russian media mobilized anti-Ukrainian hysteria among Russians in the decade leading up to the Kremlin’s 2014 aggression. While polling works when people are willing to tell the truth, other tools are needed in places like Russia where such openness and access cannot be assumed. Yet many Russians have a reflexive European identity, and being cast as belonging to a pariah state as a result of the aggression, virtually overnight, is deeply uncomfortable. Moreover, President Putin built his authority at home as a guarantor of stability and a bulwark against the economic crises of the 1990s that hurt ordinary Russians deeply.

According to the website OVD-Info, which specializes in political persecution, some 19,850 people have been arrested for protesting since February 24, 2022. Lena, 30, is a former resident of the city who now lives in St Petersburg. But if you have imperialist views, you will not be able to live in Tbilisi for long. But as time passed, I got used to it, no matter how terrible it was.
“Except back in the 1970s, when I did my army service with men from western Ukraine. I saw this Banderite reality with my own eyes,” he said, using a disparaging term for Ukrainian nationalists, which is also occasionally used as an ethnic slur against Ukrainians living in Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has often expressed the view that Russians and Ukrainians, as well as Belarusians, are one people – a nation divided. Indeed, many famous Russians, such as MMA fighter Fedor Emelianenko, are actually of Ukrainian origin. According to officials in Kyiv, there were approximately three million Ukrainian citizens living in Russia in 2018, including migrant workers sending remittances back home – and many are palpably pro-Russian.

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But local doctors are leaving their jobs in droves, unable to cope with the numbers of war-wounded being brought for treatment in local hospitals. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have left Russia, including me and my BBC Russian colleagues. But for the majority who have stayed in Russia, life outwardly is pretty much the same as it always was. But surrounded by reminders of Russia's often relentlessly violent past I felt war was now inevitable. My daily walks were my way of saying goodbye to a world, and perhaps even a country, that could never be the same again.

Where I am, people typically express their opinion at rallies, on social networks and among their inner circle. “I know activists from other countries and they support Russian activists, but they don’t understand how we can continue to live and work under the war and the current government. Some laid flowers and individually picketed with signs at the places where the Eternal Flame commemorates Russian soldiers. Surveys have suggested that the majority of Russians support the invasion. For Russian climate scientists who started their careers in the Soviet Union, the current situation can feel eerily familiar.
Fifty-three percent of Ukrainians approve of the U.S. and German governments, Gallup found. That number was a marked dip from last year’s data for the U.S., but an increase for Germany. A growing number of Ukrainians are now hoping Kyiv can negotiate an end to the conflict. That sentiment, Ray said, is especially strong near the front lines in the nation’s south and east, where the toll of war is worst. Having witnessed war firsthand, Alexeevich and Lina’s feelings towards Ukraine’s authorities could be understandable, but many Russian speakers or ethnic Russians in Ukraine are still on Kyiv’s side. One of my friends is against our government while her grandmother supports them, and I know that’s caused a quarrel between them.


The idea may be that the departure of defectors will leave a more faithful nation that will fight and die without hesitation. War is a different matter altogether, though; in recent days, Russia has not seen any of the jubilation that accompanied the annexation of Crimea in 2014. This interview was produced by David West and Sean Saldana, and edited by Taylor Haney.

But now time has passed, it’s become obvious that no positive outcomes are to be expected. When the earth thaws, it can destabilize building foundations, roads, pipelines and other infrastructure. In response, the US, EU, UK and other countries have levelled sanctions, both general and targeted, and doors have closed to Russians around the world, from research institutions to sporting events, in protest at Russia’s invasion. One pattern identified by pollsters is that most Russians say they would support peace talks to end the fighting. Going to war is one of Russians’ greatest fears, according to the Levada Center, an independent pollster. Russian companies could end up cutting hours or stopping production as sanctions bite.
AI-enabled sentiment data analysis can provide a window into how Russians feel and how fickle public sentiment is. This poses internal threats to Putin’s legitimacy and thus his power. It also signals an inherent mistrust of state institutions that will be part of Russian society — especially outside of Moscow — well after Putin’s reign ends, whenever that may be. When the nationwide “partial mobilization” was announced in September 2022, there were demonstrable dips in the effectiveness of pro-war propaganda. We tracked sentiment across Russia’s eight federal districts, from Siberia to the far east, south to northwest, and the drop in public sentiment was clearly visible. Opinions trended negative and efforts to impact those opinions were less effective and shorter lived.


"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 https://ambitious-camel-g3r4ks.mystrikingly.com/blog/uk-army-chief-warns-citizens-to-prepare-for-massive-war-with-russia -1970s, young scientists had virtually no contact with western collaborators, he remembers. In order to build climate models that can accurately predict what will happen to the Arctic in the future, scientists need measurements from across the Arctic. If the available data is concentrated in a few places, like Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia, and excludes Russia's vast Arctic expanses, then the models will be increasingly inaccurate, the study finds.


The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in "the world order."Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all. As you may have heard, The Moscow Times, an independent news source for over 30 years, has been unjustly branded as a "foreign agent" by the Russian government. This blatant attempt to silence our voice is a direct assault on the integrity of journalism and the values we hold dear. The Crimea consensus and the symbolic might of state institutions remained, but they lost their power to mobilize. One pattern identified by pollsters is that most Russians say they would support peace talks to end the fighting.

Ukrainians throughout this period have never held negative views of Russians and only because of Putin’s aggression have Ukrainian attitudes turned against the Russian state and its leaders. Nevertheless, 55 per cent of the peninsula’s population voted for Ukraine’s independence. On some level, the data likely reflect an impulse, whether born of fear or passivity, to repeat approved messages rather than articulate your own. Early Thursday morning, any remaining skepticism that their country would invade was put to rest, when Mr. Putin declared a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Instead, they have to rely on what they can see from space, from satellite images of beaver dams. "You can do a lot from space, but you need to have some boots on the ground confirming what you're seeing," Tape explains. Among them are former residents of two Russia-backed separatist statelets in eastern Ukraine – the self-proclaimed “republics” Luhansk and Donetsk, who were handed passports by Moscow following the 2014 war. However, the fear and pain of many households threatens to open a rift between the people and the Kremlin. This week, ‘Road Home’ posted a video on its channel in which an alleged Russian soldier confronted policemen for trying to prevent the women from laying flowers. Political demonstrations have been banned de facto in Russia since the pandemic, although the repression has undergone several twists and turns with the invasion of Ukraine.

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