Notes

Russia Regains Upper Hand in Ukraines East as Kyivs Troops Flag The New York Times
Volkov found that some 80% of respondents do support the military, but that group is by no means a monolith. He says about 50% have "definite support" without any qualms, but the other 30% have support with reservations. The Levada Center stays within those parameters by asking whether people support the actions of the Russian military. A couple walk in front of the Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower and St Basil's cathedral in downtown Moscow. While 80% of poll respondents say they support Russia's military, some have mixed feelings.


Sanctions have targeted banks, oil refineries, military and luxury product exports as well as members of the Russian regime and oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin. Companies, too, have closed their doors in Russia, including fast-food giant McDonald’s which has temporarily shut its roughly 850 outlets. Finally, https://diigo.com/0vdt0h of Ukrainians have ties to Russians and Russia, through mixed marriages, work, professional relations and longstanding friendships. Crimea was the only part of Ukraine to have a slight majority of Russians at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, 55 per cent of the peninsula’s population voted for Ukraine’s independence.

EU Threatens Russia Sanctions as NATO Backs Ukraine
"You will not silence us," Meduza said in a defiant statement. "We need independent media to stop the war and then try and improve life in Russia at least to a degree." There is more variety of opinion in the press, but it still largely sticks to the Kremlin line. 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. Overall, the war’s outcome will depend on the mood of the group who support it and on the group of conformists who go along with it.


“Surveys don’t show what people think, but what they are ready to say, how they are prepared to carry themselves in public,” Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, the country’s premier independent polling and research organization, said. Even before the war, Russia was not the kind of place where you willy-nilly shared your political beliefs with strangers, let alone with those who called out of the blue. 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. In the third year of his war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin decreed that this would be the year of the family in Russia. But now, two months before the presidential elections, some of those families are starting to become a headache for the government. Late last summer, a small group of mothers, wives and girlfriends of civilians, whom the Kremlin forced into military service in the Ukraine war in autumn 2022, started a Telegram channel to call for the soldiers’ return.

Russians make Thailand a refuge as Ukraine war enters second year
[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is just another man who has been in power too long. One person shouldn’t be in power for a long time, all this power twists and corrupts people. It was the same in 2014, with his decision to annex Crimea. “Since we lived in Russia, the war affected us quite a lot. My mother and I were very afraid for our lives, so the decision was made to leave. Not surprisingly, the major shift in opinion took place after 2014.

Maybe Putin and his people know more and it’s really all justified. If you can, please support us monthly starting from just $2. Polls suggest the majority of Russians, if not supporting the war, certainly do not oppose it. As a result, some of the few remaining independent media in Russia have started to censor themselves. It was rather cheap, but now I want to buy AirPods and they’re really expensive. One-quarter of respondents say they already feel the effect of those sanctions, according to Volkov.
It will heighten concerns about the strength of the post-1989 international order and America’s ability to influence it. In Russia, state-run newspapers and media outlets blame the West for aggression, mirroring the Kremlin's language. Viktor isn't worried either, but does get basic military training at his university, which is common in Ukraine.

Russia unnerved by drone attacks blamed on Ukraine
Under a bridge someone has daubed PEACE in big red letters. For centuries Muscovites have come here to build homes and businesses and get on quietly with their lives, leaving their rulers to pursue greater ambitions on a bigger stage where ordinary Russians have never had a part to play. 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." NATO countries are formally obligated to defend each other, so being admitted in the middle of a war is a difficult sell, experts say.


What we do know is that young Russians, unlike their elders, are growing up in an era of smartphones and social networks, and therefore have access to a wider range of information compared with what they are told about the war on state media. The state propaganda apparatus — which has expanded from print media and TV into online platforms — has been crucial in crystallizing this acquiescence, especially since Putin came to power in the early 2000s. Significant shifts in Russian attitudes were detected across the country, sometimes over the prosecution of the war itself. For example, when Russian armed forces met much fiercer resistance from Ukrainians in March and April 2022, and reports of high death tolls filtered back into Russia, FilterLabs detected a decrease of support for the war in many regions of the country. But as the war drags into a second year and as more Russians feel its effects on their daily lives — especially the growing number of men drafted or conscripted into the armed forces — the limitations of Kremlin propaganda are increasingly apparent.

"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." Due to Russian cards getting blocked and Russia being disconnected from SWIFT (the international payment system), my family had to send me some money in advance, just in case, and I had to withdraw it really quickly before I lost access to it. It seemed to me that all this was not real and could not last long. "We must understand that polls show us not what people really think or really believe, but what they want to share," he says.
We really want to help, but we haven’t been able to solve problems even in our own country, and now requests are flying around that we stop the war in another country. We write about it on social networks, sign petitions, send money, go to rallies, but so far this hasn’t yielded any results, the government only hits us with a truncheon. On one hand, it’s affected everyone – psychologically, economically, and in many other ways. And on the other hand, I understand that we could be hurt if we did something to try and change it. People are arrested for even walking around the area where a protest was scheduled.

"I also couldn't pay in a shop today - for the same reason." 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. Additionally, data suggests that up to 30% of Russians say they’re not closely following the situation in Ukraine, she says. It will heighten concerns about the strength of the post-1989 international order and America’s ability to influence it. Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia were stable until 2013, with positive attitudes ranging from 65 percent in the west to 93 percent in the east.
Because of everything escalating so rapidly, I’m anxious about whether I’ll have issues renewing it due to me being Russian. I have a colleague in my laboratory who is a reviewer at an open access science publisher. Now, those who want to publish and are affiliated with Russia have been asked to withhold applications, though they have not yet been officially withdrawn. The same thing with conferences – international events that take place in Moscow are all cancelled.

By mid-2014, positive views of Russia had fallen to 52 percent. Kremlin propagandists work iteratively, piloting slightly different messages successively and rolling them out in waves when their analysis signals that they are needed. Since the invasion, Russian state-sponsored propaganda waves elevated public sentiment toward the war for
an average of 14 days across all regions and topics. 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. Where I am, people typically express their opinion at rallies, on social networks and among their inner circle.

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. By that, he means that those who were most connected to the outside world might have been less inclined to support Putin's military operation, but now find themselves cut off from the West.

But by Monday customers of Russia's biggest state-backed bank, Sberbank, told BBC Russian they could not order cash via the app at all - they had to go to its office and sign a form to do so. One person shouldn’t be in power for a long time, all this power twists and corrupts people. People who are from disadvantaged groups are suffering the most, he adds, because they don't have the resources to adapt. I deleted some of my messages because the police check social media chats on public transportation.
By siding with the more militant part of the pro-war camp, which has long demanded mobilisation, Mr Putin may force doubters to pick a side and thus polarise society. 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. It will drive a wedge between families whose members fight, and those whose run for the border or curse the war. According to recent opinion polls, conducted by pollsters such as the Levada Centre which has offices in Moscow, 70-75% of respondents in Russia support the war with Ukraine. (These surveys were conducted before Mr Putin announced his mobilisation drive.) But these shocking figures are deceptive.

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