Notes

How Do Russians Feel About a War With Ukraine?
The invasion of Ukraine is just an expansion and escalation of the earlier hybrid war. “The conflict between Russia and Ukraine may last for several more years. I believe that the political system in Russia will be severely degraded in the coming years. Business, housing and community services, medicine, education – everything will sag.

He calculates that the greater (though still limited) involvement of the Russian population in Ukraine may push Russians to support their boys in uniform more strongly. Unsurprisingly, Ray said, 0% of respondents support the Kremlin, and only a sliver of Ukrainians back the Chinese government (Beijing is Moscow’s top trade partner, and one of its closest political allies). People are arrested for even walking around the area where a protest was scheduled. But many Russians are being deprived not only of a meaningless feed with entertaining content, but also of memories, work, and also important and truthful information about what is happening, which can’t be obtained from a zombie box (television). Russia was unnerved when an uprising in 2014 replaced Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president with an unequivocally Western-facing government. A stalwart of independent reporting for almost 29 years, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, suspended operations on 28 March after receiving warnings from Russia's media watchdog Roskomnadzor.
But since the invasion of Ukraine, it has been harder for Russian scientists to share data about how climate change is affecting the region. This tiny chapel is on the grounds of the Northeast Science Station near the Russian town of Chersky. Many shout about it openly, but it doesn’t end in anything good.

The Ukraine Crisis: What to Know About Why Russia Attacked
The data reveal that while a narrow majority of Russians think their government should start peace negotiations (53 percent), returning any territory to Ukraine as concessions in a negotiation would be overwhelmingly unacceptable to the public. Most of the Russian public also opposes any use of nuclear weapons by Moscow. Sadly, many of these relations have been strained in recent years due to the Putin government’s hostility towards Ukraine and the Russian media’s relentless and baseless attacks on Ukrainians. The situation has resulted in contacts being terminated for political reasons as a result of changing attitudes towards Russia as a whole. It involves a military assault with air, sea and land forces being deployed in combination with sophisticated cyber attacks and relentless propaganda disseminated by conventional as well as social media. Having a prosperous, modern, independent and democratic European state bordering Russia was perceived as posing a threat to Russia’s autocratic regime.


As Republican and Democratic politicians in the U.S. spar with one another over sending military equipment to Ukraine, “Germany has come through in its support,” Radchenko said. Nearly every Ukrainian agrees that winning the war means regaining all the land that Russia has conquered from their country since 2014, when the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Moscow, the Gallup survey found. “Given everything that’s happening, paying attention to what’s going on in Ukraine daily is more important now than it was before,” Julie Ray, Gallup’s managing editor for world news, told VOA. And Russian authorities have taken a tough line against people they consider pro-Kyiv agitators. “My husband had already come here to work, and I arrived with our child as the shooting began,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that support from Russian authorities was not as forthcoming as she would have liked. Lena, 30, is a former resident of the city who now lives in St Petersburg.

Academic presents progress report to EU committee
The ‘Road Home’ platform — Put Domói, in Russian — now has over 30,000 followers. They are a minority, largely out of fear, but a growing group of women are calling for measures to bring their relatives home from the front. They are expressing their discomfort on the channel, have addressed deputies and held protests. Beginning in spring 2014, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia begin to massively change—not because of any state-directed propaganda campaigns but in response to Putin’s military aggression.


While the defence alliance, Nato, and the US warn of an imminent invasion, many people are still unconvinced that war will happen or that it would be to Russia's advantage. 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. "We are measuring public attitudes that, more or less, coincide with how people will behave in public," he adds. "We must understand that polls show us not what people really think or really believe, but what they want to share," he says. Volkov told Inskeep that he's aware of the pitfalls with these polls, but they may still have valuable information to teach us.

Germany to Send Weapons to Ukraine in Policy Reversal
I was planning to go see my family right about this time, but it doesn’t seem possible any more. I mean – there is probably a way to go to Russia, but almost zero way for me to come back to study, and as a new semester is coming, I’m not risking it. I have a residency permit right now, but it expires in May.

Western leaders hope the unprecedented measures will bring about a change in thinking in the Kremlin. Yet Volkov added that this tolerance, however passive, is likely to remain quite stable, even strong. His Ukrainophobic attitudes can be attributed in part to his being steeped in deeply rooted feelings of both Russian superiority and resentment towards Ukrainians who have consistently asserted their distinct identity.
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. To put it simply, before launching an offensive, it’s worth thinking about who will fight in that offensive and how willingly, and to what extent an active conflict will prompt people to rally around Putin. https://matzen-larsen.thoughtlanes.net/ukraine-conflict-what-we-know-about-the-invasion-1707943836 suggests that even in the best-case scenario, the mobilization effect will be nonexistent. 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. In his annual “Victory Day” speech on May 9, Putin said the ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine was necessary because the West was “preparing for the invasion of our land, including Crimea,” according to CNBC.


Now, any anti-war speech can result in up to 15 years of imprisonment. Some of my friends are leaving the country right now, and I understand them. Surveys have suggested that the majority of Russians support the invasion.

He told me that, when researchers added the option “I don’t want to answer this question,” twelve per cent of those surveyed opted for this answer—a number that he presumed, given the atmosphere, was made up nearly entirely of those who opposed the war. As the war in Ukraine drags on, though, these positive waves of public sentiment are getting shorter, particularly outside the major cities, and are needing to be deployed with increasing frequency across Russia. In that sense, the current conflict is a renewal or even a continuation of the Cold War because its goal is to restore Russia as America’s greatest military rival. But when things opened up in the 1990s, he says, his field exploded.
And the chaos itself can backfire — or at least quickly diminish its effectiveness — when out of step with lived experience, further undermining legitimacy in the state. Considering all this, telling Russian men and their families that it is in their interest to fight, and die, in faraway Ukraine is a harder story to sell. In other words, Russians appear to be less and less influenced by propaganda from Moscow, especially when it clearly contradicts the struggles in their daily lives. As Putin’s war of choice inflicts personal costs on citizens, Russians seem less willing to swallow the state narratives that are delivered over state television, which remains the primary source of information for most Russians. Russian propaganda is good at manipulating public opinion.


Website: https://matzen-larsen.thoughtlanes.net/ukraine-conflict-what-we-know-about-the-invasion-1707943836