Notes

What do Russians think of the invasion of Ukraine? AS USA
But in an interview with Channel 4 News, Mr Zelensky said he was open to changing the law to allow for a wartime election. The votes are banned under wartime legislation and Mr Zelensky said in November that he was opposed to holding one because “now is the time of defence”. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is holding a two-day hearing on Russia’s record on the treatment of children. “Russian air defense systems in Leningrad Oblast are most likely positioned to defend against strikes from the north-west and west, as Russia has historically arrayed its air defense in the area to defend against hypothetical Nato attacks,” it said.

In the mid-1970s, young scientists had virtually no contact with western collaborators, he remembers. 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. Does it change anything to know that many Russians oppose Putin’s war but are powerless to stop him, or to understand that others have been duped into supporting it through his hyper-nationalistic discourse? The day before the start of the war, Putin told the nation of WWII-era promises not to expand NATO eastward and said those promises had been broken five times. Since anyone with anti-war signs is arrested immediately, protesters casually stroll along until a large enough crowd gathers to shout their opposition to what's going on in Ukraine. “I grew up in the Soviet Union, where we were all brothers and sisters,” he said.
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. But 66 percent of Russians aged between 18 and 24 have a positive or very positive attitude toward Ukraine. That’s despite a backdrop of unceasing vitriol directed toward Ukraine on state television, and the persistent, oft-repeated idea that it is external attacks that require Russia to take defensive measures. One local family visiting St Petersburg were shocked to find nothing had changed while their own lives had been turned upside down. 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.

Zelensky condemned for claiming Russian regions
“Britain has, again, as with all of those other things, led the way with a £2.5billion package and a security agreement, a cooperation agreement with president Zelensky and Ukraine. Russia will be grilled by the United Nations on Monday about the thousands of Ukrainian children believed to have been abducted and sent to Russia since the war began. The Russian foreign secretary flew on an unspecified “northern route to bypass unfriendly countries” in 12 hours and 45 minutes, Russian state news agency Tass reported. Ukrainian drones attacked a St Petersburg oil terminal on Friday and another 110 miles west at Ust-Luga on Sunday. The national guard is controlled by the interior ministry and is responsible for internal security, public order and guarding critical infrastructure. Thousands of non-Ukrainians have served in its armed forces since Russia’s invasion in 2014.


But to combat the anxiety, we try to remember our connections with friends and family and enjoy the spring weather. 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.

Live Reporting
There are likely many others who hate Russia, but it must be remembered that it’s necessary to separate the Russian government, a mad machine of repression and destruction, and the people of Russia, who for the most part are not guilty. I can’t even really tell why they believe what they believe. It could be their Soviet past, or the government propaganda that has been poured out for so many years, or just that there is too much fear and anxiety to actually allow the thought that the world is different from what they expect. Being far away from them helps because we try to prioritise keeping our relationship intact and caring for each other more than anything. Sometimes I can’t help but try to convince them, which obviously doesn’t work.


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. And that figure came from among those who agreed to participate at all; Miniailo suspected that the polls were not capturing a majority of the real antiwar sentiment, whatever its size. 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.


In the weeks leading up to Russia's invasion, I would walk for hours in the central Moscow district of Zamoskvorechiye, where I had lived and worked in the BBC office for seven years. Zaichikov travelled to Kyiv during the Maidan revolution, out of curiosity rather than to take part. Working as a tour guide and being rather well-travelled himself, he is also reluctant to dismiss western Ukrainians as “Banderites”. And Russian authorities have taken a tough line against people they consider pro-Kyiv agitators.


Does it change anything to know that many Russians oppose Putin’s war but are powerless to stop him, or to understand that others have been duped into supporting it through his hyper-nationalistic discourse? A few weeks after my trip, I contacted Peter Pomerantsev, who had accompanied me from Lviv to Kyiv. He had been born in Kyiv in 1977, when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, but was brought up and educated in the United Kingdom, after his parents went into exile there. He has worked in both London and Moscow, where he became an expert on Russian propaganda. Now a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Pomerantsev shuttles between Washington, D.C., and Ukraine.

Officials in Washington, Kyiv, and European partner nations have sounded the alarms that the consequences of aid drying up may be catastrophic. Travel is hard – you can’t go anywhere with a Russian passport. For example, in certain online communities, they’ll just post a single number (indicating a date) and everyone understands everything. He is not a bright leader, and not the tyrant that the opposition paints him as, but he is definitely not the best thing that could happen to Russia. The concentration of human beings – and not cyborgs with eternally gloomy faces – per square kilometre is much higher here than in Moscow.
In addition, drafted Russian soldiers, as well as contracted ones, now receive much more pay. Compensation paid to wounded soldiers and the families of killed soldiers, many of whom live in the countryside, has also increased significantly. These payments are not comparable to the ones made before the war, Gudkov said. These are sums that citizens in these rural areas of Russia have never seen before, which also explains why Russia is seeing no anti-war protests.


Read More: https://matzen-larsen.thoughtlanes.net/ukraine-war-three-ways-the-conflict-could-go-in-2024-1708031107