Difference between revisions of "What do Russians see and hear about the war in Ukraine"

Latest revision as of 23:12, 23 April 2024

There are some prominent Russians who are willing to speak out against the invasion of Ukraine. Elena Kovalskaya, formerly the artistic director of the state-owned Meyerhold Theatre and Cultural Center, resigned from her role last week in protest. There has been a raft of sanctions imposed on Russia and on Russian citizens in the past week in response to President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Western powers are unwilling to send troops to fight in the conflict but have sought to make the Kremlin’s actions unsustainable with tough economic punishments.

• When they first invaded, Russia's bigger and more powerful army was expected to have a much greater impact, but so far, the Ukrainian forces have managed to push them back in lots of areas.









• I asked him how he felt about the notion of justifiable hatred in the context of Ukraine.









• There has been a raft of sanctions imposed on Russia and on Russian citizens in the past week in response to President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

That scenario, of a Russian military incursion into a Nato country, almost unthinkable until recently, is when Nato and Russia could indeed be at war with each other. Nato is certainly taking no chances and has put over 100 warplanes on full alert. Britain was one of the first countries to send reinforcements - to a grateful Estonia, where Kusti Salm is nevertheless realistic about what they can achieve. Despite desperate pleas from Kyiv for the West to come to its aid, Nato has categorically ruled out sending troops to Ukraine. "We need to give them weapons like Javelin anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, ammunition and protective equipment. Every Nato nation should be helping them," he says. Resistance has already begun, with a nationwide call-up of men of fighting age and 18,000 automatic weapons being handed out to the citizens of Kyiv, in addition to the uniformed army and reserves who are already putting up stiff resistance.

There are, however, Russian independent media who still defy government restrictions. For example, Novaya Gazeta blurred out the anti-war poster held up by a protester who interrupted a live news bulletin on Russian state TV. "Nothing is inevitable, but the Ukraine invasion in particular has shown that Russia sees war as an instrument of policy, as a tool to change the world order in its favour, and not simply as a means of defence. "In one sense the situation now is far more perilous than it was in 1914 and 1939 because the major powers all have nuclear weapons. "Washington's impulse after the Hamas attack was to provide Israel with unequivocal support but also to do everything it could to contain the fires that atrocity started - what we are now seeing are the limitations of that policy.

Russia Has Suffered a Crushing Moral Defeat. And Russians Know It.

"The regional war in the Middle East, with its epicentre in Gaza, is unlikely to escalate into a World War. Currently it's not a flashpoint between the major world powers. "Certainly, the time we are living in is enormously dangerous. And the killing of three US troops in Jordan has increased the likelihood for the crisis in the Middle East deepening considerably. The head of the British Army said UK citizens should be "trained and equipped" to fight in a potential war with Russia, describing those living today as the "pre-war generation". Last week, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps warned the world could be engulfed by wars involving China, Russia, North Korea and Iran in the next five years, and said we are moving "from a post-war to pre-war world". The defence secretary has warned we are moving to a "pre-war world", top military brass are talking about conscription and tensions in the Middle East show no signs of abating. While dissenting voices to Putin’s invasion are minimised in Russia, the scale and the intensity of the feeling of support for Ukraine means that the opposition cannot be entirely silenced by the Kremlin.

• Russia was unnerved when an uprising in 2014 replaced Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president with an unequivocally Western-facing government.









• Elena Kovalskaya, formerly the artistic director of the state-owned Meyerhold Theatre and Cultural Center, resigned from her role last week in protest.









• Mr Zelenskyy has called for public officials to disclose their incomes to increase transparency and eliminate corruption as Ukraine tries to meet the stringent requirements for its bid to join the European Union.









• Boris Lvin was a senior advisor to Russia’s representative at the World Bank and had worked at the institution for 24 years.









• Recent assessments by the ISW show Russian forces have made advances north of Bakhmut.

The ISW does note that Russia's advances might be the result of Ukrainian forces withdrawing to "more defensible positions" near Robotyne. When Ukraine retook Robotyne in August it was hoped that its forces would be able to cut the land corridor to Crimea, making Moscow's supply lines more complicated. The attack on the Slavneft-YANOS refinery caused no fire or casualties, governor Mikhail Yevrayev said.

Explosion at Kyiv TV tower leave five dead

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. I asked him how he felt about the notion of justifiable hatred in the context of Ukraine.

• "Of course, we feel this responsibility. We should have used the opportunity to change our country," former opposition MP Dmitry Gudkov accepts.









• It’s hard to find a Russian family without Ukrainian relatives and friends, husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, chess partners and colleagues.









• Ukrainian forces were also quick to deploy Western supplied arms such as the Nlaw anti-tank system, which proved highly effective against the Russian advance.









• Speaking to CNBC Timothy Ash, an emerging markets strategist, said that Putin had “spectacularly miscalculated” the response in Russia to war with Ukraine.









• "The nightmare scenario would be that the states close to Russia double down on aid to Ukraine while those farther west decide to force a deal on Putin's terms. Then Europe itself could fracture," he says.

And it’s not just the usual suspects, the malcontents already known to the Kremlin. Major public figures, prominent journalists and artists have spoken out against the war. In mid-March, Aleksei Miniailo, a former social entrepreneur and current opposition politician, oversaw another telephone survey with the aim of trying to capture the effects of fear and propaganda on survey data. 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.

It is this that makes the anti-war protests against the invasion of Ukraine so telling. Russia's invasion plan has not gone entirely to plan - Britain's Defence Intelligence says hundreds of Russian troops have been killed and resistance is stiff - but it is progressing. Russia's forces outnumber Ukraine's by more than three-to-one, and there are questions about the quality of Ukraine's military leadership and how long its forces can hold out. A spate of Ukraine-linked attacks on Russia's oil infrastructure have reportedly led Moscow's energy ministry to propose restricting flights over energy facilities. And what I'm really torn up about is that there are hundreds of phenomenal Russian journalists who are working so hard to tell Russians the truth about their own country. These are people who made very small salaries when they could have made much more by going over to the Kremlin side.

Eastern European countries, who fear they may be next in Putin's sights, are watching nervously for any Russian manoeuvres close to their borders. Kusti Salm, the permanent secretary at Estonia's Ministry of Defence, is one of those pushing for more military assistance to Ukraine. "But it might not destroy the Ukrainian government - provided it has made plans to set up a new government HQ, most likely in the western part of the country." Within weeks of the war breaking out, a scheme was launched called Homes for Ukraine, matching Ukrainians with families in the UK who were able to offer shelter and accommodation. But there was criticism that current rules and systems were too complicated and too strict. Mr Biden said that the US would be giving a new military aid package to Ukraine, worth $500m (around £415 million).

The town is sometimes described as the gateway to the city of Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia and its proxy forces since 2014. Taking Avdiivka - which lies close by - would allow Russia to push the front line back, making it harder for the Ukrainian forces to retake the territory. Only aircraft deployed to protect energy facilities, or those carrying top Russian or foreign officials, will be allowed to fly with special permission in the designated zones, according to the Vedomosti daily newspaper.

• But in the east of Ukraine where the country borders Russia, military troops are still fighting over territory and many places are still too dangerous for school of any kind.









• That’s the response of many Russians to the sight of rockets and artillery shells hitting Ukrainian tower blocks that in their concrete uniformity could easily be in Moscow.









• Nato defence chiefs have re-examined his lengthy speech of July 2021 and concluded they urgently need to reinforce Nato's eastern borders lest Putin is tempted to make a move on countries like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.









• Russian air defences have prevented a drone attack on an oil refinery in the city of Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, the regional governor has said.









• Before the war, Russia made demands including a promise that Ukraine would not join a group of countries called Nato.

You can be horrified by what Russia has done and is doing—as of course I am—and, at the same time, be concerned about dehumanizing a whole group of people in response. But, at the same time, I can understand why this might seem like sophistry to Ukrainians who have lost their homes, their friends, and seen their fellow Ukrainians tortured and murdered. Mr Navalny's team have been trying to undermine support for the war via YouTube. "No-one attacked Russia, no-one needed these separations and these deaths," Mr Volkov wrote on Twitter. "It's strange to ban people for being Russian, whether or not they support Putin's regime," argues Anastasia Shevchenko, an activist who spent two years under house arrest for protesting against the Russian president. This week Lithuania - together with Latvia, Estonia and Poland - banned all Russian tourists, arguing they should not be enjoying democracy and freedom in Europe while their government attacks those very values in Ukraine.

There are reports of attacks on Ukrainian military infrastructure across the country, and Russian convoys entering from all directions. You can argue that it isn’t realistic or human to force all Russians into a black-and-white response—either oppose the war or you are complicit. People have young children to look after, cancer and other illnesses to manage, aging parents to care for. It’s easy to imagine that they feel they can’t—or don’t want to—get arrested for opposing a distant war because of these kinds of responsibilities, even if it is being waged in their name.