Why Many Russians Feel a Deep Unease Over Going to War The New York Times

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.

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. I can’t even really tell why they believe what they believe.

Russia Regains Upper Hand in Ukraine’s East as Kyiv’s Troops Struggle

One is peddled by the best-known talk-show hosts who tell viewers that the “special operation” is part of Russia’s total and existential war with the West—which is, of course, hell-bent on obliterating Russia. This apocalyptic narrative sets up Ukraine as the site of this great battle. The second narrative, prevalent on news programmes, emphasises that the “special military operation” in Ukraine is being conducted by professionals to liberate the Russian people of Donbas and other regions. It is presented as a “just war” predicated upon Russia’s responsibility to help Russians in need.

• The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep.









• The second narrative, prevalent on news programmes, emphasises that the “special military operation” in Ukraine is being conducted by professionals to liberate the Russian people of Donbas and other regions.









• The concentration of human beings – and not cyborgs with eternally gloomy faces – per square kilometre is much higher here than in Moscow.









• 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.









• However, the fear and pain of many households threatens to open a rift between the people and the Kremlin.

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.

Why Do So Many Russians Say They Support the War in Ukraine?

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.

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.

Russia uses new tactic to bomb Ukraine and overcome its air defenses

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.

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.

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 https://gilliam-albrechtsen-4.technetbloggers.de/where-is-bill-evans-from-eyewitness-news , 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 ‘Road Home’ platform — Put Domói, in Russian — now has over 30,000 followers.









• For many Ukrainians, especially in the south and eastern regions of the country, Russian is the first language.









• A growing number of Ukrainians are now hoping Kyiv can negotiate an end to the conflict.









• For that, I was named ‘Volunteer of the Year’ in my hometown of Odintsovo.

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.

• Significant shifts in Russian attitudes were detected across the country, sometimes over the prosecution of the war itself.









• Yet many Russians have a reflexive European identity, and being cast as belonging to a pariah state as a result of the aggression, virtually overnight, is deeply uncomfortable.









• People get used even to war, especially if they live far from the battleground.









• This was a decline of almost five percentage points from 1989, reflecting in part an out-migration of Russians after the breakup of the Soviet Union.