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After Russia took control of the Crimean Peninsula in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan revolution, rebels in eastern Ukraine held their own unofficial referendums demanding greater autonomy from Kyiv. They were not recognised by Ukraine’s central government, whom Ivan blames for what happened next. The term dates back to the second world war, when nationalist fighters in western Ukraine led by Stepan Bandera sided with the Nazis against the Red Army and committed war crimes against Poles and Jews. “I grew up in the Soviet Union, where we were all brothers and sisters,” he said.

And the chaos itself can backfire — or at least quickly diminish its effectiveness — when out of step with lived experience, further undermining legitimacy in the state. Considering all this, telling Russian men and their families that it is in their interest to fight, and die, in faraway Ukraine is a harder story to sell. In other words, Russians appear to be less and less influenced by propaganda from Moscow, especially when it clearly contradicts the struggles in their daily lives. As Putin’s war of choice inflicts personal costs on citizens, Russians seem less willing to swallow the state narratives that are delivered over state television, which remains the primary source of information for most Russians. Russian propaganda is good at manipulating public opinion.

How do Russian citizens feel about the war in Ukraine? Here’s why it’s hard to tell.

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. To put it simply, before launching an offensive, it’s worth thinking about who will fight in that offensive and how willingly, and to what extent an active conflict will prompt people to rally around Putin. The evidence suggests that even in the best-case scenario, the mobilization effect will be nonexistent. Russian President Vladimir Putin used the national Russian holiday commemorating Nazi Germany’s defeat at the end of World War II to demonize the West, suggesting it is responsible for Russia’s war in Ukraine. In his annual “Victory Day” speech on May 9, Putin said the ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine was necessary because the West was “preparing for the invasion of our land, including Crimea,” according to CNBC.

But since the invasion of Ukraine, it has been harder for Russian scientists to share data about how climate change is affecting the region. This tiny chapel is on the grounds of the Northeast Science Station near the Russian town of Chersky. Many shout about it openly, but it doesn’t end in anything good.

Russia unnerved by drone attacks blamed on Ukraine

The ‘Road Home’ platform — Put Domói, in Russian — now has over 30,000 followers. They are a minority, largely out of fear, but a growing group of women are calling for measures to bring their relatives home from the front. They are expressing their discomfort on the channel, have addressed deputies and held protests. Beginning in https://anotepad.com/notes/5cyqjfns , Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia begin to massively change—not because of any state-directed propaganda campaigns but in response to Putin’s military aggression.

It’s too scary, the idea of dying or being locked up for life. Plus, I can see that despite many years of huge protests, the people have not achieved anything at all. It is difficult to get any reliable information out of Russia, but our research suggests the Kremlin’s hold on its people is perhaps not what it is made out to be. In his mobilisation speech on September 21st, Mr Putin used choice rhetoric of the party of total war to persuade Russian citizens of the enemy’s proximity and the need to defend the motherland. Many commentators declared that this rhetoric would undermine the fragile support of the majority for the war. Mr Putin has a long record of masterfully manipulating public sentiment.

Honor the memory of our boys or laying flowers for “never again,” the group said last weekend. “At first no one wanted to bring our subject to light; it seemed like a secret under lock and key. If we wrote to some governor when he spoke on a live program, he answered the most banal questions and ignored the hundreds of messages about the return of the mobilized,” she recalls. As for me, personally, I lost the opportunity to move into my own apartment, which I was supposed to do soon because the renovations became too expensive. Because of this, I will have to live for a long time in a place where I’m not very comfortable. My feelings are mixed regarding the decision of our president.

The data reveal that while a narrow majority of Russians think their government should start peace negotiations (53 percent), returning any territory to Ukraine as concessions in a negotiation would be overwhelmingly unacceptable to the public. Most of the Russian public also opposes any use of nuclear weapons by Moscow. Sadly, many of these relations have been strained in recent years due to the Putin government’s hostility towards Ukraine and the Russian media’s relentless and baseless attacks on Ukrainians. The situation has resulted in contacts being terminated for political reasons as a result of changing attitudes towards Russia as a whole. It involves a military assault with air, sea and land forces being deployed in combination with sophisticated cyber attacks and relentless propaganda disseminated by conventional as well as social media. Having a prosperous, modern, independent and democratic European state bordering Russia was perceived as posing a threat to Russia’s autocratic regime.

The invasion of Ukraine is just an expansion and escalation of the earlier hybrid war. “The conflict between Russia and Ukraine may last for several more years. I believe that the political system in Russia will be severely degraded in the coming years. Business, housing and community services, medicine, education – everything will sag.

• She supports our president, despite the fact that her whole family is still over there.









• AI-enabled sentiment data analysis can provide a window into how Russians feel and how fickle public sentiment is.









• But the problem with measuring public opinion in a country under authoritarian rule and censorship, Botchkovar says, is that the data are highly imperfect.









• That means they're on conflicting sides — and feel the shunning of Russia most of all.

As Republican and Democratic politicians in the U.S. spar with one another over sending military equipment to Ukraine, “Germany has come through in its support,” Radchenko said. Nearly every Ukrainian agrees that winning the war means regaining all the land that Russia has conquered from their country since 2014, when the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Moscow, the Gallup survey found. “Given everything that’s happening, paying attention to what’s going on in Ukraine daily is more important now than it was before,” Julie Ray, Gallup’s managing editor for world news, told VOA. And Russian authorities have taken a tough line against people they consider pro-Kyiv agitators. “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. Lena, 30, is a former resident of the city who now lives in St Petersburg.

• People walk next to a cracked panel apartment building in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk in 2018.









• Our analysis shows that the Kremlin is increasingly unable to control public sentiment outside major cities with national propaganda.









• Those with more meagre resources are going to recruiting stations.









• Many of those drafted into the Russian army regardless of age, military experience and medical history come from ethnic minority dominant regions like Buryatia.









• King's academics share expert analysis of the war in Ukraine following Russia's invasion.

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. Surveys have suggested that the majority of Russians support the invasion.

• 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.









• That the Kremlin was right to block the majority of independent media sites they used to read.









• As it thaws, it creates massive problems for infrastructure built on top of it, causing roads to buckle, building foundations to crack and pipelines to break.









• 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.









• Kremlin propagandists work iteratively, piloting slightly different messages successively and rolling them out in waves when their analysis signals that they are needed.

I was planning to go see my family right about this time, but it doesn’t seem possible any more. I mean – there is probably a way to go to Russia, but almost zero way for me to come back to study, and as a new semester is coming, I’m not risking it. I have a residency permit right now, but it expires in May.

• Crimea was the only part of Ukraine to have a slight majority of Russians at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union.









• In April, a national propaganda campaign created a positive spike in local sentiment in Buryatia towards the war that lasted for 12 days before reverting to pre-campaign levels.









• Late last summer, a small group of mothers, wives and girlfriends of civilians, whom the Kremlin forced into military service in the Ukraine war in autumn 2022, started a Telegram channel to call for the soldiers’ return.

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. As concern grows that Russia will invade Ukraine, BBC correspondents gauge the public mood in Moscow and Kyiv on whether the crisis could lead to a wider war in Europe. The educated and the wealthy, many of them urban residents, are fleeing mobilisation. Those with more meagre resources are going to recruiting stations. They may be frightened and apprehensive, and not very keen to fight, but they are not ready to break away from the imaginary “national body” whose will and aspirations are expressed for them by Mr Putin. The fraught nature of their decisions to enlist will increase their hostility toward those who make the opposite choice.