And if I am not imprisoned soon for speaking out against war, I want to try – together with like-minded people – to do everything I can to give our country hope for a peaceful future. I deleted some of my messages because the police check social media chats on public transportation. In addition, the police recently searched the flat of a close friend of mine and then put her under house arrest for two months. She had been putting up posters that said “No to war” around the city.
"Was Putin really going to start a war with Ukraine?" he asked. 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.
Ukraine war: Three ways the conflict could go in 2024
On Sunday evening, when sanctions against Russian central bank reserves were announced, you could still use an app to order a dollar for up to 140 roubles, and a euro for up to 150. Dollars and euros began running out within a couple of hours of the invasion. Since then, very limited amounts of those currencies have been available and there is a cap on how many roubles you can withdraw. At the start of 2022 one dollar traded for about 75 roubles and a euro for 80. But the war has helped set new records - at one point on Monday a dollar cost 113 roubles and a euro, 127.
None of us wanted this war, and we stand in opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions. At demonstrations, people are detained for several days or fined. Now, any anti-war speech can result in up to 15 years of imprisonment. Some of my friends are leaving the country right now, and I understand them.
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. But this week, after several television appearances by Mr. Putin stunned and scared some longtime observers, that sense of casual disregard turned to a deep unease. "Practically along the entire line of contact our armed forces are improving their situation, to put it modestly," he said at his marathon news conference. "I don't know why they are doing it, they are pushing their people to get killed, it's a one-way trip for Ukrainian forces. The reasons for this are political, because Ukrainian leaders are begging foreign countries for aid." A classified US intelligence report estimated this week that 315,000 Russian soldiers had been either killed or wounded since the war began - which it said was almost 90% of Russia's military personnel at the start of the invasion. Mr Putin said that "there will be peace [in Ukraine] when we achieve our objectives".
'617,000 Russians fighting in Ukraine'
I asked him how he felt about the notion of justifiable hatred in the context of Ukraine. It’s 9 pm in Moscow and the police have already broken up the bulk of the protests. 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. Standing at one queue in Moscow, Evgeny (name changed), 45, said he wanted to withdraw money to pay off his mortgage. “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.
- On some level, the data likely reflect an impulse, whether born of fear or passivity, to repeat approved messages rather than articulate your own.
- It will drive a wedge between families whose members fight, and those whose run for the border or curse the war.
- People I met in the park wondered whether the statue had been the intended target, or whether the missile had been meant to hit a nearby government installation, and been downed by an air-defense missile?
- "We are measuring public attitudes that, more or less, coincide with how people will behave in public," he adds.
- However, Mr Orban's political director said this morning that Hungary was open to using the EU budget to allow further aid for Ukraine.
- It is in a fight for its survival and understands what Russia will do if it stops.
Online, most independent news websites are blocked or restricted, and so are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The fact that the majority of Russians tune in to TV news means they are inclined to at least hear the Kremlin's message - and possibly believe it. But many in Russia would be taken by surprise if war was to start soon. In Russia, state-run newspapers and media outlets blame the West for aggression, mirroring the Kremlin's language. OK, I confess I didn't know who the woman was, but her thoughts didn't exactly seem preoccupied by a possible invasion on her country. Life has not been much fun for performers during the various phases of Covid lockdown, with actors, dancers and even stand-up comedians facing closed down venues.
She supports our president, despite the fact that her whole family is still over there. When I hear it from Ukrainian people, I begin to doubt that our president’s strategy is wrong. Maybe Putin and his people know more and it’s really all justified. Surveys have suggested that the majority of Russians support the invasion.
Sixteen months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the majority of respondents still support the war, and only 20% say they are against. "You will not silence us," Meduza said in a defiant statement. " https://euronewstop.co.uk/why-ukraine-is-important.html need independent media to stop the war and then try and improve life in Russia at least to a degree." 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. That is because its most avid proponents, and its most intractable opponents, will not change their minds.
Even so, rather than taking place in different public locations around the city, as usual, the forum was convened in an underground theatre on the hilltop campus of Ukrainian Catholic University, a ten-minute drive from the city center. There, for three days, panelists addressed topics related to Ukraine, Russia, war, and culture. 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. By mid-2014, positive views of Russia had fallen to 52 percent.
- He says the firm asks about peoples' feelings, and is seeing that both groups — those who support and oppose the military's actions — are anxious and afraid.
- "When the operation in Donbas started I went to the ATM and withdrew the savings I had in Sberbank in dollars. Now I literally keep them under my pillow.
- If the US abandons the military alliance, it will fall to European countries to ensure a Ukrainian victory, Mr OBrien says.
- You don’t know when your friends and family will be taken away for mobilisation.
Putin’s authoritarian and great power nationalistic regime fanned ethnic Russian nationalism, turning Russians against both the Ukraine state and Ukrainians as a people. Meanwhile, Putin’s repeated claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” left no room for a Ukrainian identity other than that of “little Russians” in his Eurasian Union. Putin’s total control of the Russian media mobilized anti-Ukrainian hysteria among Russians in the decade leading up to the Kremlin’s 2014 aggression.
Young Russians tell us about a war few wanted and how the sanctions are affecting their lives. On the contrary, the people taking to the streets are those against it, despite threats of arrests. It’s sunny, people are taking selfies on Red Square, while a long convoy of National Guard buses rolls by the Kremlin walls. 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.
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. 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.