AI Can Tell Us How Russians Feel About the War Putin Wont Like the Results

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. 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.

• Not surprisingly, the major shift in opinion took place after 2014.









• But everyone who wants to participate can easily find out about it.









• Somewhat confusing the situation is the fact that most Ukrainians are able to speak or easily understand both Russian and Ukrainian.









• But it is difficult to determine how reliable these surveys are, in light of new crackdowns on free speech and dissent in Russia, where even the use of the word “war” to describe the invasion is now a crime.









• I got a government email saying that we had until March 14 to download all files from Instagram.

Usually, people will spread the word about protests secretly. But everyone who wants to participate can easily find out about it. For example, in certain online communities, they’ll just post a single number (indicating a date) and everyone understands everything. But I don’t feel safe expressing my opinion, especially when I talk about it online or on the phone.

Why the war in Ukraine is bad for climate science

But it is difficult to determine how reliable these surveys are, in light of new crackdowns on free speech and dissent in Russia, where even the use of the word “war” to describe the invasion is now a crime. In the meantime, sanctions affect every Russian citizen in their daily lives – both those who support and those who oppose the war, those at home and those abroad. Positive Russian attitudes toward Ukraine once again dramatically collapsed during the Euromaidan, which was portrayed in massive state-sponsored information campaigns as a Western-backed coup bringing Russophobes and fascists to power. 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.

Russian information operations remain formidable in their ability to mobilize and leverage state resources. They are particularly adept at muddling information environments, making people unsure of what to believe, and sapping their motivation. King's academics share expert analysis of the war in Ukraine following Russia's invasion. But ordinary Russians, many of whom get their information from state-controlled television which repeats many of the Kremlin's lines, are expected to start noticing differences to their lives soon.

How do Russians feel about the war in Ukraine?

But when things opened up in the 1990s, he says, his field exploded. "During that time, lots of data became available from the Russian permafrost regions," he remembers. International scientists started collaborating with Russian scientists to investigate how permafrost was changing. On top of that, western scientists no longer have access to field sites in Russia, he says.

Online, most independent news websites are blocked or restricted, and so are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Russia was unnerved when an uprising in 2014 replaced Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president with an unequivocally Western-facing government. Moscow’s move against Ukraine, once a member of the Soviet Union, is sure to increase fears over the security of other former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe.

Carrie Davies, BBC News Moscow correspondent

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.

• 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.









• “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.









• As reported by ‘On the Way Home,’ some balaclava-wearing members of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Center for Combating Extremism approached the woman on the subway to identify them.









• A bus service has started up connecting the city to the local cemetery where growing numbers of soldiers killed in Ukraine are being buried.









• Although Ukraine is a much smaller country, it is strong patriotically.









• Continued approval of the army and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she added, are key to victory.

The Kremlin has also been unable to use its propaganda to sustainably mobilize popular sentiment around an affirmative agenda, in this case its war in Ukraine. Muddling the information environment and sowing mistrust has not generated positive support for Moscow’s misadventures. It’s impossible to get objective and representative data on the attitudes of the Russian population towards the war in Ukraine, but the indications are that the invasion has provoked deep misgivings, at least among those who access global media. Images on social media have shown long queues forming at ATMs and money exchanges around the country in recent days, with people worried their bank cards may stop working or that limits will be placed on the amount of cash they can withdraw. Excluding such data from climate models makes them less accurate, and the problem will get worse over time, a new study warns. "By neglecting Russian sites, we decrease our chances to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change," says Efrén López-Blanco of Aarhus University in Denmark, who is one of the authors of the paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

• The stock market remains closed amid fears of a massive share sell-off.









• In the mid-1970s, young scientists had virtually no contact with western collaborators, he remembers.









• This has been pretty hard as we have very different views.









• 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.









• The idea may be that the departure of defectors will leave a more faithful nation that will fight and die without hesitation.









• As Bekeshkina has written, “In getting Crimea, Putin has lost Ukraine.” Putin’s war will only end when this fact is finally realized in Moscow.

But what kind of guarantees they would give independent Ukraine is not yet clear. That the Kremlin was right to block the majority of independent media sites they used to read. Probably yes, if more people had stood up for their freedom and challenged state TV propaganda about trumped up threats from the West and Ukraine. A bus service has started up connecting the city to the local cemetery where growing numbers of soldiers killed in Ukraine are being buried.

After such colossal losses, the army will have to be rebuilt again. “Since the Russian Federation is the largest state in the world at the moment with a huge population, it follows that this is a dangerous beast. It is impossible to write off Russia just like that, as many people do, predicting defeat, reparations and so on. Polls have suggested that even though they are the least likely to support the invasion, many still back it.

• For months, Russians of all political stripes tuned out American warnings that their country could soon invade Ukraine, dismissing them as an outlandish concoction in the West’s disinformation war with the Kremlin.









• Some of the first data FilterLabs gathered after the invasion was from the republic of Buryatia, a mostly rural, underdeveloped region 3,700 miles from Moscow and bordering Mongolia.









• It’s been over a year and some of the conscripts have not come home,” she complains.









• 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.









• This man has a certain political style, to which most of the Russian population is already accustomed.

One local family visiting St Petersburg were shocked to find nothing had changed while their own lives had been turned upside down. For Russian climate scientists who started their careers in the Soviet Union, the current situation can feel eerily familiar. People walk next to a cracked panel apartment building in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk in 2018. Climate change is causing permafrost, or permanently frozen ground, to thaw across the Arctic. When the earth thaws, it can destabilize building foundations, roads, pipelines and other infrastructure. https://barlow-larsen.blogbright.net/what-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-could-mean-for-the-uk , Tape helped start the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, so scientists all around the Arctic could collaborate and share data.

According to the Athena Project, a collective of sociologists and I.T. Twenty-one per cent of TV viewers didn’t know the goal of the operation. Sentiment analysis is a well-tested form of artificial intelligence that trains computers to read and understand human-generated text and speech. To understand the nature and composition of the pro-war majority, you need to dig deeper. Russian state television—instrumental in shaping public opinion—serves all these audiences. On some level, the data likely reflect an impulse, whether born of fear or passivity, to repeat approved messages rather than articulate your own.