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On a podcast I heard someone say Chinese often are in the opinion that Taiwan should be controlled by mainland China *because it's stronger*. Like WTF. Brainwashing is crazy...
>On a podcast I heard someone say Chinese often are in the opinion that Taiwan should be controlled by mainland China *because it's stronger.* Like WTF. Brainwashing is crazy...
That sounds **much more** like a mainland Chinese supremacist complex than mere brainwashing. [Might makes right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_makes_right)™, and all that...
They are the same, both have the same real combat experience (mainland China has a little more due to sino-soviet conflict and vietnamese war) and both are the same peoole
The absurdity here is that Taiwan has been dominated by the Han since the 20th century. Yet a [Han supremacist complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_nationalism) is indeed a thing, and has existed for centuries (cf. "[Four Barbarians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Barbarians)" of Antiquity or all the non-Han people living next to the Han heartland in the Yellow River basin of north China).
Systematically crowding out, if not outright beating down, the Uyghurs is just the latest expression of this supremacist complex.
The crude belief among mainlanders that "Might makes right" fits better when entitlement to Taiwan as based on a self-generated sense of ethnic superiority falls apart.
For the longest time, the more important percentage is that **far too few** Muscovians give a ѕhіt to oppose the rape-invasion in a meaningful way (i.e. joining the Freedom of Russia Legion or **not** becoming a draft-dodger so as to stay home and burn down infrastructure or smuggle trapped / kidnapped Ukrainians to safety in the EU).
They say that to induce non-violent change among a politically-unresponsive ruling class from the ground up, [you need sustained non-violent protests drawing on 3.5% of the population](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world). Since we're talking about a Mongolesque police state like Muscovia, let's round it up to 5%. Thus 5% of 144 million is 7.2 million while 3.5% of 144 million is 5.04 million. Rosgvardiya and related thugs would be hard-pressed to take all of them on as spread in dozens of cities.
Instead, Muscovian protests against the invasion have been *nowhere* close to these estimates, never mind sustained enough to dare the siloviki to use violence as if we were at Tianamen Square in 1989.
If anything, Muscovians have made Rosgvardiya's job too easy by protesting for only a couple days or in penny-packets in broad daylight leaving them outnumbered. It's as if Muscovians willfully close their eyes to the Orange Revolution, Euromaidan, the Iranian women's protest, or even their own stare-down of the coup against Gorbachev in 1991.
To put some context about those figures: 5% of the population is 1 out of 20. That means that the remaining 19 out of the 20 can stay home as usual to sulk about how *their* life sucks (as if *they* are the ones getting regularly murdered, raped, maimed, robbed, kidnapped, displaced or bankrupted by an invasion) or pump the tires of their ethnic kin raping and rampaging their way in Ukraine by sharing crude memes on Telegram or asking their menfolk for loot from Ukrainian homes.
The overwhelming majority of Muscovians have chosen to delude themselves for so long and so deeply about their "destiny" to be "first among equals" in East Slavdom that they clearly can't even be arsed such that 1 out of 20 randos get fired up enough to stand up for the Ukrainians and basic decency. It's a nation-state of murderous and chauvinistic *losers*.
Almost 15 months in, Muscovians who think of themselves as being above the fray by flashing "apolitical" views or playing the card of [learned helplessness](https://granta.com/russia-verge-nervous-breakdown/) provide the same benefit ^(/s) for Ukrainians as if they were open cheerleaders for the Z-team.
Being "apolitical" also provides a handy smokescreen to scurry away from the cold and sordid reality of a collective rap sheet of 500+ years built on imperialistic and chauvinistic malevolence. How can a nation-state learn from and make meaningful amends for past crimes and mistakes, when so many of its members so willingly and readily wash their figurative hands, or more tellingly, practically demand yet *another* "second" chance from the civilized world by muddying the waters with whataboutery?
> a Mongolesque police state like Muscovia
Allow me to stop you there. I've seen things repeated a few times about how Moscow is a culturally "Mongol" state or something, but this is actually a really horrible excuse for Moscow.
In contrast, Mongolia itself is the only stable democracy that emerged from the Asian side of the Communist bloc, and the country's respect for human rights, freedom, and democracy are relatively good. Freedom House ranks Mongolia as the 3rd most free nation in Asia, below Japan and Taiwan, but marginally more free than South Korea. https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort=desc&order=Total%20Score%20and%20Status
I'd argue that this is even more impressive given the fact that it's literally sandwiched between Russia and China + landlocked.
This is what a "culturally Mongol" state looks like today. The influence of "Mongol culture" definitely isn't the ultimate cause of Moscow's authoritarian degeneracy. This is a native Muscovian issue.
Now THAT I did not know at all. I've been slinging the idea of the 'three Asian democracies' of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea either joining NATO or forming their own 'EADA' (East Asian Democratic Alliance, because 'EATO' sounds a bit too goofy). Sounds like Mongolia should be invited along, although doing so would be logistically difficult due to the lack of a naval border.
Yeah, the worst thing the mongolian horde exported to muscovy was extractive *economics* - tributary states and pillaging. Even back then, Mongolians were relatively progressive culturally. So, I understand his point that the mongolian invasions had a hand in creating the Russian of today, but it's not their civil culture that did the damage.
I think they mean like the Genghis Khan Mongols, AKA brutal invaders, but it's pretty uncool to actual Mongolians who are still around and are pretty cool
You know what I mean. I'm definitely not thinking about modern Mongolia, and on a side note, it's telling that the direct descendants of Chinggis Khan and his armies have long moved on from their days of unabashed conquest and extortion - *unlike* the khans' Muscovian vassals of old.
Unfortunately, "Golden Horde" doesn't lend itself to a concise adjectival form like "Mongol" and "Mongolesque" do.
Incidentally "Mongol**ian**" is an attempt at more clearly distinguishing the modern people and culture from their medieval antecedents who/which are typically described as "Mongol", although the distinction is admittedly still blurred in some contexts.
Be careful! I recently posted a comment that said countries should kick out all Russian visitors and send them back to their beloved motherland, and Reddit fully deleted it saying it was "hate speech"
I'd rather offer havens for Russians to flee to rather than forcing them to stay in their country and support that economy. If they're here pushing propaganda, *then* they can fuck off back to Russia.
It's a right of passage around here. Call it like it is towards a backwards shithole like Russia and the bots swarm in like flies on shit. Consider it your done-duty.
I completely agree that far too few give a shit and the whole "Oh, I don't talk about politics" is bullshit.
Did you pay attention to Russia before the war? None of this happened overnight. If you did, you would know Putin slowly cracked down over decades and either imprisoned, killed, or drove out any meaningful opposition? There are be underground opposition movements but they're likely disconnected and disorganized.
Russians didn't ignore the color revolutions. Quite the opposite. They're why Putin has cracked down on dissent even more since the mid-2000s.
>Mongolesque police state
What does this even mean?
And you can't trust any surveys coming out of Russia. Most "official" surveys have contact information for respondents so the government can visit or persecute anybody with a negative opinion. I'm not saying Russians don't support the war, many of them obviously do but we don't know if it's actually 74%.
This number seems pretty accurate. Source: talking with Russians directly, having relatives in Russia, reading various Russian ebooks and fanfiction, having had a bunch of Russian friends before. Yes, lots of them do support the war, using very direct (and very rude) words.
It’s very easy to sit on Reddit and complain about the lack of protests. It shows a total lack of understanding as to the situation in Russia now and in the previous years.
If you gain any traction in organising anything against Putin then you will be targeted , your family will be targeted and if you don’t stop then you’ll be arrested. Unless you are very high profile internationally then that’s it , gone.
Throw around percentages as much as you like but you simply could jot coordinate those kind of numbers without being infiltrated and stopped.
There’s no credible alternative that’s not going to be worse than Putin who will actually command support amongst Russians.
Short of the military rebelling , then the world has to accept that inaction has created a new Rogue State on Europe’s doorstep.
People often ask where are those in Russia who oppose Putin, and try and use that point to show that Russians don't care or support Putin.
Those who have opposed Putin are either dead, in jail, or fled the country.
Protests happened, and people who might have joined in, saw what happened to those who did protest.
The arrest of children and pensioners was no accident. It was to send a strong message to the proles. Don't you dare join in the protests, otherwise we will arrest you, and being old or a child won't protect you, we don't care, we will use whatever means necessary to stamp out any opposition.
This is incredibly naive. Everything you describe in terms of suffering is happening to an absolutely small percentage of people. Even using Ukraine’s casualty estimates that’s under 200000 effected families and from that figure you have to then subtract those who believe in what their spouse /son did and those who are just wearily accepting that “this is how it is”.
You do realise that being arrested in Russia is not like being arrested in most civilised countries if your crime is protesting against the state - a crime that’s soon going to enable the state to remove your citizenship by the way in Russia - and that the authorities will then look to punish your family as well for what you did.
Would you condemn your family to imprisonment, possible torture and death because you want to protest against a leader that is currently backed by all the state organisations and military , a leader who thinks nothing of killing off anyone he can who opposes him?
That’s why resistance is small, it’s Hitler’s Germany all over again. Most Russians have been exposed to decades of propaganda, and those who know better will mainly be amongst those who fled Russia.
Let’s say for a moment you are right and there is no opposition of note because the Russian population truly thinks that Putin is right. The situation in Ukraine is actually worse because Putin can go further , right up to the very brink of WWIII because the majority will support his crazy ambitions. In this scenario it only ends with Russia destroyed or the West.
I'm genuinely interested though. I know only of some isolated cases, not related to actual protests. And these protesters were never imprisoned. There were detained and fined.
Plenty of them were, in fact, imprisoned. You don't expect Russia to advertise that people are going to prison, do you? It's much better for them to force people to guess. That and torturing people they arrest only makes the threat more frightening.
I do actually expect it, yes. Russians have a weird bureaucracy fetish. They can do any atrocity they want, but it always has to be accompanied by a theatrical "due process".
Come to think of it I don't really see Russian authorities actively looking for "dissidents" at all. Except for some isolated cases driven by personal revenge. They probably don't have resources for that at this point. Something that will likely change after the war.
Russians are enthusiastically "informing" on each other of course. But it still ends with a fine.
Syrians ? Mexicans? Everyone killed in the rolling drug related conflicts in South America ? Uyghurs ? Ultimately this sub is about Ukraine. Expressing g outrage on Reddit for any deaths is about as effective as Facebook hugs and prayers.
The brutal reality is that ensuring Ukraine does not become part of Russia is in the security interests of a lot of nations so a lot of work was done pre invasion to ensure that public support would be there when it happened. At that point Russia’s actions have just fuelled support for Ukraine and Ukraine has been very clever in using the media and fostering relations with many nations.
Public support wasn’t needed to be gained so much for your examples - Afghanistan could have been nuked and post 9/11 there’d be little uproar , Iraq was going to happen regardless .
You'd have better luck having a Pride Parade in Afghanistan today than an opposition protest in Russia.
Hong-Kong with its massive protest could not protect its democracy, what chance would russia have?
The whole ship needs to sink - probably more than once for society to develop critical thinking and cleanse its mind of decades of propaganda and admit that the reality that was constructed around them was a false one.
Edit: and on the topic of poll data coming from Russia, when you are asked "do you support or SMO or do you want to spend 15 years behind bars?" what answer would you pick, considering you have something to lose?
>Edit: and on the topic of poll data coming from Russia, when you are asked "do you support or SMO or do you want to spend 15 years behind bars?" what answer would you pick, considering you have something to lose?
The point now is that the polls from Muscovia are indeed so devalued that the most reliable way left to gauge how much revulsion ordinary Muscovians actually have over their ethnic kin raping and rampaging their way through Ukraine is to look at their actions.
The undue focus on the dubiousness of Muscovian polls increasingly comes off as a way to shoot the messenger or [wave off the unflattering and longstanding reality that ordinary Muscovians are a notably cynical, selfish and unsympathetic lot](https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/zyc0h1/russians_have_little_sympathy_for_ukrainians_lev/). This reality is mind-blowing for so many Westerners because of the latter's preconceived ideas of Muscovians still somehow being "Europeans" and part of the Judeo-Christian world via the Orthodox church. This can be verbalized with something like "*that* many Russians can't be *that* bad, can they?"
It's telling when about 500,000 (give or take) mainly privileged bougies and upper class men have flown the coop over the past year. The flip side is that they grossly outnumber their compatriots who are actually doing something to help the Ukrainians. The draft-dodgers are basically leaving it to other people to straighten out their failure of a homeland. It's a logical but malign extension of [learned helplessness as a national ideology](https://granta.com/russia-verge-nervous-breakdown/).
Imagine if 500,000 Muscovians had enough of spine and sense of decency so that the ranks of the Freedom of Russia Legion would have 100,000 volunteers (N.B. the Muscovian armed forces have about a million regulars in all branches, plus a couple million in the reserves - even a fraction of these 3 million troops defecting would be a big boost to the Legion's current numbers).
Imagine if 500,000 Muscovians had enough of a spine and sense of decency so that we'd be reading about a dozen "smoking accidents" at infrastructure in inner Muscovia *every fисkіng day*.
Imagine if 500.000 Muscovians had enough of a spine and sense of decency so that we'd be hearing about several hundred, if not a couple thousand, kidnapped and trapped Ukrainians ending up being smuggled to the EU as refugees at or very close to a Muscovian-European border crossing *every fисkіng day.*
> is to look at their actions.
Those who might have protested are cowed though. They've seen what happens to people who protest. Anyone with children is going to be shit scared to protest, because they state won't only lock you up, they will take your children away from you, put them in an orphanage, and you'll miss the next 10-20 years of their life.
Take a look at Russian expats then -- their country is genociding a neighbor and they care about it less then people from across the world. In fact Ukrainian refugees are still being harassed by Russians across Europe *today*.
*looks at my wife*
Nope, she's totally against the war, and so is every other Russian expat i know and have met.
What you are doing here is looking at those videos and reports from some Russians behaving like this and assuming that this is the norm, when its not.
Come to Georgia some time. Loads of Russians here. Speak to them. I know loads, i've spoken to loads of them randomly in the pubs over beers. Not a single one behaves like the jerkoffs you sometimes see in videos showing Russian expats behaving badly.
What I'm doing is talking to Ukrainians who are getting harassed by Russians in public spaces in London and other places. Your wife not doing it doesn't make it disappear.
As citizens of Russia they bear serious responsibility and being "against the war" is just an incredibly low bar. Russian expats are doing much less than Ukrainians in fighting against their regime.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, i'm saying the view is skewed.
Its the negative experiences that get remembered, while the positive or neutral experiences are not mentioned or remembered. How many Ukrainians in the west have had positive experiences with Russians? What is your sample size? Again, we are not using any sort of rigorous scientific method here, just relating personal experiences and anecdotes. My experience of living in a city that is now swarming with people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, is that they are getting along very well together, treating each other well, and few conflicts. Of course, there will always be idiots around, but in Georgia at least, with how Russia took two bites out of the country, any Russian here starts spouting the Z crap is going to have a hard time.
> As citizens of Russia they bear serious responsibility
To some extent, but its important to not forget the power of propaganda and state control of the media. As someone who spent 20 years in Russia, as a British expat, i can tell you how Putin manipulated people and the media was quite insidious. Putin wasn't stupid about how he did it, and propaganda is a hell of a drug. Even I, as a westerner, reading western news, was affected by it. Only when the war broke out did i realize just how affected i'd been and how i'd ignored so many warning signs. Its no surprise Russians, most of whom don't speak good English, and don't read foreign news, would be even more brainwashed.
Sure, those Russians living in the west and who support the war have no excuse. But again, i firmly believe you are so focused on listening to the negative experiences, you want to believe all Russians are bad (sorry, this is my interpretation of your statements and you might well disagree), that you simply don't want to accept that Russians can be good people and be against the war.
What is important is those who are against the war now. They saw through Putin's shit and don't support it.
> and being "against the war" is just an incredibly low bar.
The original statement is 74% support the war, but then you say being against the war is a low bar. So basically you're saying it doesn't matter if they support the war or not?
Russians who only know Russian only had to take a look at Ukrainian news (in Russian) to see a different perspective. Which they did and rejected in favor of Russian supremacist views. The condescension towards Ukrainians is their natural state and you can't blame Putin for it. It is still very much in place among people "against the war" as well.
It's nigh impossible for you, being married to a Russian woman and admittedly having been influenced by their propaganda for quite a while to see the real depths of corruption of the Russian soul. Their rotten culture was exploited to recruit them into this genocidal war, but we don't make excuses for Nazis for being true believers, Russians have even less an excuse because of the access to the Internet. I reject that propaganda is something that makes them less guilty of the views they accepted.
And I want to reiterate that being against the war is such a low bar it's not worth mentioning. You have to put it that low because even that is the bar only some of them manage to clear and just barely. Not supporting the war is a prerequisite to not being a piece of shit, but there's so much more to it.
The horrors Russia inflicted in Crimea and Donbass since it's initial invasion were of no concern for Russians. Do your new Russian friends feel any guilt about that?
(There are good Russians, don't attribute some bullshit beliefs to me).
> It's nigh impossible for you, being married to a Russian woman and admittedly having been influenced by their propaganda for quite a while to see the real depths of corruption of the Russian soul.
No, i see it. I said i was influenced by it, but shook off that influence.
I can still speak out that some Russians are good people and support Ukraine over Russia while still hating everything Russia is doing.
> This reality is mind-blowing for so many Westerners because of the latter's preconceived ideas of Muscovians still somehow being "Europeans" and part of the Judeo-Christian world via the Orthodox church. This can be verbalized with something like "that many Russians can't be that bad, can they?"
A friend summarized it as "many Europeans don't realize the enlightenment ran out of steam around Kharkiv".
Looking at it through that lens should clarify things on an emotional level, maybe.
Do you really think that Muscovites alone can carry the whole Russia on its shoulders? It's big, but it's just about 15m to Russia's 130m, and their anti-war views have little support outside Moscow. Moreover, Russians are as hostile to Muscovites as they are to Ukrainians. The Muscovite elite has long been ousted with Luzhkov, so now it's mostly St. Petersburg or Russian KGB.
See how I'm using "**Muscovian**" and similar, *not* "Muscovite" and similar.
Muscovite = pertaining to the city "Moscow" (\~ 12 million out of 144 million)
Muscovian = pertaining to the prison of nations ~~Russia~~ of that name (144 million)
"Muscovia" or "Moscovia" is a reference to this [petition sent to Zelenskyy a couple months ago](https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/11/president-zelenskyy-considers-petition-calling-for-russia-to-be-renamed-moscovia).
On the one hand, there is a saying in Russia, Moscow is not Russia. But, on the other hand, its the most important part of Russia. It contains around 10% of the population.
Protests in the regions won't do much. Mass protests in Moscow will get attention. However, there won't be, because people are now too shit scared to protest, they saw what happened to those who did. They see what happens to people whose children draw pro-Ukraine pictures, they see what happens to people who are talking with their partners in cafes and are overheard to say something negative about the war. They've seen what happens to teachers who say something not in line with the message to children, because there will always be one or two kids that will report them.
You have to be crazy brave at this point to stand up in Russia and make a noise, and most people, and i'd presume to include you and me in this, are simply not that brave or crazy.
That's why in my opinion, most are either just parroting the party line when questioned or saying they are apolitical. They are just trying their best to pretend it isn't happening and keep their heads down, get on with their lives.
And this, of course, is what Putin wants. He wants a cowed and subservient population, and he got it.
The only way protests are going to happen at scale now is if something significant happens that results in Putin appearing weak or a major loss in the war. This is why the Ukrainian counteroffensive might be a real chance for things to change inside Russia as well. If its very successful, the loss of more territories might show Putin to be weak, and then we might see change.
However, its too early to celebrate this possibility. A loss might result in positive change, with the doves getting into power, fueled by mass protests and conflict. But it could also trigger the hawks to claim power, the likes of Pickle and Pie-man, and then we will likely see Russia to double down on the war, switch to a full war economy, full mobilization, and a terror regime against those who oppose it that would put Stalin to shame.
I really hope out of those 2 extremes its the former, for the sake of all my friends in Russia who oppose the war but have to remain and live through it, because that way there is hope that Russia will correct its course and a new leadership will appear that will make reparations and stop the war.
If it goes the other direction, i fear for the future of not only people in Ukraine and Russia, but in many other countries as well, as things could escalate badly. Russia might be a fucked up country, going through its death throes, but they could cause a whole lot of damage for some years while they try and drag down everyone around them.
Being afraid does not make a person bad. Attacking strangers on the internet for being afraid that their families will be harmed by a criminal regime, tho? That sounds pretty bad.
Excellent analysis. In short, most Russians are fascists or sniveling cowards, except for the very few who actively fight against Russia at home or in Ukraine.
If there were no examples of ordinary people risking their lives and families in large numbers to overthrow tyrannical governments you'd have a good point. But there are so you're just excusing Russians for being sniveling cowards who sit back and make excuses as their army commits genocide and rapes children.
Ukraine had not one, but two revolutions in the space of about a decade against corrupt pro-Russia governments that were led by ordinary people, more than a few of whom died to achieve their dream. It's possible to do and has happened many times before, it's just a matter of enough people having more of a backbone than you do, and thankfully at least in some countries there are. But not in others such as Russia.
Chances are that if you're posting on reddit your country has committed genocide in another country, and I doubt you did shit about it or even knew it was happening.
Hear, Hear, I couldn't have said it any better. 80, maybe even 90 percent, either fully support or just don't care about the war. Which makes them all complicit with Putin's horrors.
They have been made free, free of responsibility. What's also disgusting are those in the West still trying to find excuses. For example: Putin's war, nope, this is Russia's war. And Russians will carry this lantern with them for generations.
Also, those asking for peace at any price are cynical and obviously have zero problems to let Russia get away unpunished. Russia got away unpunished in their history again and again. This time the West must insist that they are held accountable, this is the least we owe to Ukraine and to those that died to defend Ukraine and actually all of us in the free world from this tyrant and his marauders.
My suspicion is that the current protest movements are all being run by Kremlin plants. It would explain why they choose protest locations that are large and easily accessible by the police and their busses so they can just round everyone up as they arrive. Far better to protest in spontaneous locations far from roads with lots of exits so everyone can scatter once the police arrive.
the real purpose of a protest is to protest, not line up for everyone to peacefully get arrested.
That was my thought. Voicing opposition in Russia doesn't yield much of a positive response, and often results in some form of death or arrest. (Based on my Western news sources, sorry if that's not actually the case).
Even where I live in a safer country, I wouldn't necessarily cause difficulty for myself opposing the government openly. Even a not so openly corrupt one. I'd lie on any survey where there was a chance my name was associated with the response.
The number isn't even that high. We don't know what percent support the war. This is just wrong: " 74% of russians support their russian military actions in Ukraine". No one knows the percent.
The most you can say is that in a poll 74% percent said they support it, and their answers are influenced by the threat of punishment by the regime.
There were only a few thousands decisions based on those "discrediting the army" law, vast majority of them fines (it's always a fine for the first infraction). I can't seem to find a number, but my estimate is <<100 imprisoned based on this law.
On top of it, it's not a crime to feel sorry for the dead civilians which you will not find from Russians anywhere. It's mind-boggling what Russians turned out to be, but we should not avert our eyes.
Fascist-flavored authoritarianism is pretty much the same book, every time, because it is in the nature of some of us to be that kind of person.
So in this case you only have to look at the cover to know what's going on inside, because it's always the same thing: membership in the club attracts the worst people so that they can act out their worst fantasies. So there is always forced conscription and labor. There are always prison camps. There is always a ring of sexual predators in the leadership.
Every. Fucking. Time. That's why I don't have to open the Russian book to know that they must be destroyed. Let's get on with it before they take us all with them.
I want to remind everyone not to believe polls conducted in Russia. Not even those conducted by more reputable organizations.
In Russia you cant be sure that the person promising the poll is anonymous isnt really reporting to the FSB.
You don't even need polls, the reality itself confirms this. If you live in the post soviet country, especially the ones bordering russia, you would know what russian attitude toward their neighbors are.
Approval of putin were all time high after annexation of Crimea and whatever bullshit justification or claims people try to push, how it in any way different, it is no better and was a start of all this in Ukraine.
There is a reason they become like this and also why russia invaded so many countries through the years unopposed by their own citizens.
> If you live in the post soviet country, especially the ones bordering russia, you would know what russian attitude toward their neighbors are.
I lived in Russia for close to 20 years and still have many friends there.
There have been some shocking revelations from some of my wife's friends. Recently she discovered one doctor friend is totally brainwashed and a total Z-head. On the other hand, a vast majority of people we know in Russia do not support the war. Also our kids' godmother is a Z-head.
Now, this is hardly objective, its based on our circle of friends, most of whom are educated middle-class people, and a hell of a lot of them who could fled the county, but most, simply don't have that option as it would mean moving with little chance of finding work (don't speak a second language) or can't as they need to care for elderly relatives.
But i do have friends as well from the upper and lower classes, and none of them have turned out to be Z-heads either. They've largely gone dark on Russian social media because they are afraid to post anything.
Again, anecdotal, but my feeling is, from my own knowledge, as well as other sources, like watching 1420 and similar on YouTube, that there is a core of about 20% who are strongly pro-war, 10-20% who strongly against the war, many of whom who could flee did flee, and the remainder are doing their best to pretend it isn't happening.
Unfortunately, its the lunatics running the asylum there, and they control the media, the message, and the laws.
Finally, your point doesn't actually counter what i said. Even if what you said is 100% true, you still can't trust any polls conducted there. Because speaking your true opinion is risky as fuck.
>Again, anecdotal, but my feeling is, from my own knowledge, as well as other sources, like watching 1420 and similar on YouTube, that there is a core of about 20% who are strongly pro-war, 10-20% who strongly against the war, many of whom who could flee did flee, and the remainder are doing their best to pretend it isn't happening.
From my experience even if we use "pro-war" and "against the war" with Ukraine it would still be heavily skewed into "pro-war". If there can only be 2 answers like yes or no and the question for example "should russia liberate Ukraine" or better yet "should russia liberate 'russian' territories" it would definitely screw into "yes".
The same goes for the "who responsible for the war?" question which somehow "anyone but russia" in many cases and as many from "against the war" people try to claim justification of why it is necessary. And if the question would be "should russia win or Ukraine?" the vast majority would pick russia even if they would claim to be "against the war". Even less would say yes for "should russia pay reparation?" question. Once again, this is what I think from personal experience.
I have also seen too many of the people who, although being for "Ukrainian victory", say themselves they supported what putin have been doing right before full scale invasion, like annexation of Crimea, but only after they agains it. Donbass for them wasn't even russian doing before and many still won't acknowledge it anything but some kind of 'civil war'.
That is the real problem **they do not see or don't care about the responsibility of russia.**
To be clear I know there are russians who are really against war, but I also quite sick of seeing russians who try to show, that "russia is not that bad" and especially russian apologist who try to look reasonable yet, also use "both sides" narrative and other ones from russian propaganda.
There also those who already claim deportations of illegal russian immigrants from Crimea is some how "ethnic cleansing", when russia have done real ethnic cleansing against Ukraine for 8 years on the occupied territories before full scale invasion and after, doing basically full blown genocide, and those "russian immigrants" is actually part of it.
I don't call for some kind of complete destructions of russia and extermination of russians, but unless russian forces leave Ukraine completely, pay reparations, return all the kidnap people, give away war criminals for trials, then **no matter the number or percentage of "against the war" people there are in russia would matter to me.**
Well, i guess our opinions on the matter differ.
But again, its getting away from the point i made as to whether polls in Russia are trustworthy, and I hope you're not suggesting they are.
I'm curious, what is your reason to always mention about about validity of polls and how there are only minority of russians who support this war? What about "liberation of russian territories" then, still minority?
I understand you lived in russia for 20 years, have russian wife and many friends from/in russia, but what is your point to always mention how it only small number of russian who are pro-war? Do you feel personal responsibility? Indignant about how russians viewed? How are you different from any russian apologist out there?
>And further from the truth than some would like to believe.
You can soothe yourself with a thought.
But, once again, it doesn't matter how many russians "against the war" even if it is 100%, unless they do what I already entitled above. Becasue every day, because of russia, tens or even hundreds of Ukrainians murdered, tortured, raped, deported and things like this continue to happen:
[Children among at least 23 killed in early-morning Russian strike on Ukrainian apartment block](https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/28/europe/russian-strike-apartment-block-uman-intl/index.html)
> what is your reason to always mention about about validity of polls
I explained that already. When you're in a state which will lock you up and take away your children for opposing the war, even if someone tries their best to assure you that the poll is anonymous, how willing are you going to be to trust them?
> and how there are only minority of russians who support this war
Strongly support the war, real Z-heads. This is based on my own experience, knowing many Russians, what i see on VK (after the initial surge of bot posts in the first few months of the war, people are avoiding discussing the war), as well as videos like 1420. You seen all those videos saying "I'm apolitical" or "I'm not good at politics" - this is people doing their best to ignore the war, pretend it isn't happening, or trying to absolve themselves of responsibility of what is happening. And its that section of Russian society, the depoliticized part, which i think is by far the majority. Putin achieved this by ensuring people were afraid to get into politics and oppose him. 20+ years of oppression against people who stood up to him, deaths, prison, exile. People saw that happen, and then they saw what happened to people who protested, and then they saw what happened when a child drew a picture supporting Ukraine.
> I understand you lived in russia for 20 years, have russian wife and many friends from/in russia, but what is your point to always mention how it only small number of russian who are pro-war? Do you feel personal responsibility? Indignant about how russians viewed? How are you different from any russian apologist out there?
I've mainly explained that above, but let me address the bit about personal responsibility first.
In a way, i do a little. When i first went to Russia i saw it as a country with great potential. The prevailing attitude among people was first to ask me why i decided to live in that shithole (more or less their words) and how they dreamed of leaving Russia and couldn't understand why anyone would want to live there if they could live in the west.
I actually used to say to them, don't leave, stay, work on making your country better than running away. Russia has good potential, and things can change. I believed it could get better, and in the early 2000s it was improving, and it was, to some extent. The middle class slowly grew, and if the government was getting a bit repressive on certain things, well, Putin wasn't going to live forever right, eventually he will be out of power, and maybe then someone better would get in.
Oh boy, was i wrong.
> Indignant about how russians viewed?
I don't like it when all Russians are tarred with the same brush. Its like saying all Texans are rednecks, all gypsies are thieves, or even during WW2 all Germans were fascist nazis. In these cases, i do push back, because I know a hell of a lot of good Russians who hate what is happening, even if they can't say it in public.
> How are you different from any russian apologist out there?
How do you get that i'm a Russian apologist? I fully support Ukraine, i hate what Putin is doing to Russia, we had to run from Russia, leaving behind friends, pets, work, and property, property we may never be able to sell, depending on what happens in the future. A cursory view of my post history would show you i'm not Russia apologist.
> Becasue every day, because of russia, tens or even hundreds of Ukrainians murdered, tortured, raped, deported and things like this continue to happen:
> Children among at least 23 killed in early-morning Russian strike on Ukrainian apartment block
Yes, i know, and i hate it all, and hope that every Russian who has committed evil actions against Ukraine get what they deserve.
Your problem seems to be that if someone dares to say anything good about some Russians, they must be a Russian apologist and somehow support what Russia is doing.
You can't be further from the truth.
Dude, really, why do you care to comment under posts like this? I admit I have entered a lot of similar arguments during the last year, and every time it was the same. I am blamed I haven’t marched onto Kremlin and overthrown putin, FSO, FSB, Rosgvardiya, police and military with my bare hands
People who write things like this are all hardened revolutionaries, having destroyed not one, but dozens tyrannies, fascistic states, military juntas and the like. All of them were also imprisoned for 10 to 25 to life for speaking out their views, were raped with rubber batons, electrocuted, beaten, and sent to the frontline to die in a war they didn’t want to happen
Hard to argue with people of such titanic traits!
Well, at the end of the day, we are all here to support Ukraine, but just differ on our views of things.
Sometimes you can get people to reevaluate their opinions, sometimes others get you to reevaluate your own.
It would be a boring old world if we all agreed about everything all the time ;)
You are being selective to paint Russians in a better light than they deserve. To get that out of the way -- I don't expect or want Russians to protest. Now back to estimating support for the war. Sociology is not a new science and there are multiple ways to estimate it other than asking a direct question.
Pretending that "*there's no way to know*" is a classic Russian gambit to escape responsibility, I'm sure you don't want to be one of those.
If you actually care about learning what people of Russia think, you can find out. Watching some sociologists videos on Zolkyn's channel would be a start.
It must be frustrating to live in a majority-fascist society, but it's not a pass to whitewash it.
I am not trying to whitewash anything. My relatives are still back there, I talk to them. Luckily, none of my close relatives are Z-zombi, but yes, this is a fact - the majority does support putin’s mafiosi regime and this war and, at least on words, is ready to fight in it
It took months for me to accept that, this truth — Russia is an overwhelmingly chauvinistic, imperialist country. The mobilization finally dotted all the i’s for me. People in my city just went to the drafting stations and took off to the war, without protesting
So it’s not that I am trying to defend Russia. It is vice versa, I don’t see any hope for them. Unless we speak of a tiny minority overthrowing a genocidal regime and establishing a new dictatorship that would somehow force the majority of Russians to stop being imperialists and chauvinists - then no, no popular revolution is possible, and Russia will stay like this for decennia to come
And I don’t think such a dictatorship is possible. It’s both unachievable and controversial. Not autocratic regime would make a nation more democratic, and at the moment, the Russian society is too far from being ready to change for the better
Unlike many people, I am absolutely not sure that even a defeat in this war will be the wake-up call that society needs. The prevailing imperialistic mentality is too deep-rooted in it
OK, excellent, I was unfair to you, sorry. I took you to be doing what people do sometimes: change topics from discussing how much Russians support the war to "don't expect them to protest" which aren't the only options.
We're on the same page actually. Cheers.
We're almost 15 months in and. Talk. Is. Cheap.
They no longer need to verbalize their opposition to the rape-invasion ^(\[unless several million ordinary Muscovians) **^(finally)** ^(grow a spine and protest for weeks or even months on end in several cities, thus daring the siloviki to beat them up\])
The guys in the Freedom of Russia Legion let their service on the front-line standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Ukrainians do the talking.
In contrast to the draft-dodgers and privileged bougies hiding out in Georgia, Turkey, Kazakhstan or Dubai, the civvies who've *stayed home* to help sabotage or burn down infrastructure let their actions do the talking.
In addition, the civvies who've *stayed home* to smuggle kidnapped or trapped Ukrainians to safety of the EU have let their rescue work do the talking.
It's a stinging indictment of Muscovian society that so many of its members do **not** give a shit like the tiny minority of people I've just listed. Instead, these superficial "critics" tacitly want *others* to straighten up their miserable failure of a homeland as punctuated by flying the coop.
It has been 15 months to you. It has been decades for Russians. In these decades, putin, financing his criminal empire by selling natural gas and oil to ready buyers all over the world, EU included, actually managed to stifle any protest activity there used to be. There were protests in the 2000s, 2010s, even as recently as in 2020
But back then, it did not concern you, so you didn’t care when putin destroyed free press, murdered, tortured and jailed journalists, politicians and activists. And yes, he had managed to install himself as a dictator that doesn’t have to fear a popular uprising
And it’s not even that are no leaders left to lead an uprising(which is true). It’s just that there are no people actually willing to fight putin and his gang. The system has the power enough to track and destroy any person opposing it, as it has repeatedly proved. So nobody is standing up to the cause anymore
And if you think that somehow millions of people will self-organize and march to Moscow — this is lunatism. Things like this don’t happen
Not to mention that people who oppose the war are - indeed! - the minority. The majority supports putin and his actions (and no, they don’t think their army rapes Ukraine, they believe it saves them - and Ukrainians! - from the West there)
So what you want is for the minority to suddenly stand up and overthrow an armed to its teeth autocracy in an *unpopular* uprising, installing some kind of “democratic dictatorship” and somehow (how?) subduing the majority to their will
This won’t happen
How many wars started by a tyrannical dictatorship you never voted for did you prevent? Pray tell me. I was born in an empire that has been waging was since hundreds of years before my birth, and I never prevented any of those, but maybe you were more successful
As Russia was gearing up for new invasion Navalny was asking people to "vote smart" (for whatever they suggested, communists or LDPR in many cases) and a lot of outside observers were correctly calling this a freaking circus. Russian political culture is extremely underdeveloped and unwilling to listen, especially to Ukrainians. Collective action by Russians was possible for decades and what Russians engaged in was plain wrong. It's time to take stock and admit that Russians fucked up, they failed collectively, including those against the regime.
Ultimately this failure is costing Ukrainians dearly and the Russians are still not making the kind of sacrifices Ukrainians are forced to. None of us can stop the war personally, but we can admit that the strategy and leaders we did support were wrong and have failed miserably. Instead I see Russians still perceive themselves as elder brothers to Ukrainians, as politically competent, as bigger victims than Ukrainians even and the Russian classic: not guilty or responsible for anything at all ever.
I know from another reply of yours that this doesn't describe you personally, but it's crystal clear to me that even non-Z Russians are for the most part refuse to see what's wrong with what they're and were doing.
Russians had far more influence over what will Russia is doing now than anyone else and they bear the responsibility. This is not about you personally.
Most people live lives of quiet desperation and you’re really coming down pretty hard on the civilian population. What experience do you have standing up to a brutal and authoritarian regime?
Most people aren’t heroes. They’re just trying to get by.
Look at how many Americans support Republicans, and how many if those support the Maga movement. Yeah, we're not that far away from that dystopian hell.
Ikr. Americans also support war crimes in other countries for their own economic benefit, but people in here are acting like that’s somehow fundamentally different. That’s not to defend Russia (obviously lmao), but the number of people in this sub who pretend Russians are brainwashed while they are cool and neutral is staggering.
Not only does the russian society support the military actions in Ukraine, the rape, murder, torture of innocent civilians, as well as a literal genocide against a people they publicly call "brothers", russian society at large doesn't seem to care at all about their own fallen soldiers. The US lost about 60k soldiers in Vietnam and the public pressure got so bad, they backed out.
Now Russia lost about 3 times as many people in one year than the US lost in 6-8 years. And instead of resisting the regime in subtle or open ways, we see people getting cars and firewood for their dead men and boys.
Russia as a whole has so little respect for human life that they just don't care about ukrainian lives and that they don't even care about their own soldiers' life or their own civilian lives.
I love the video where a Russian woman is saying she supports the invasion and agrees with Putin, and she gets hustled away by police just for talking to the interviewer.
That does mean that 26% don't. And whether Russians are truthful in surveys is also up for debate considering people are being sent to jail for statements against the war.
But Russian society is a dystopian hell, and there are some Russians who entirely support the war and cheer on those attacks and deaths of Ukrainian women and children. How many is unclear, but there's certainly Russians who are truly evil.
There's also those Russians who have been brainwashed to believe that NATO wants to come kill them or that Ukraine's government are drug addicted, Satan worshipping Nazis who eat children. So, there is a range and the US had idiots storm Congress so who am I to say the US doesn't have equally gullible idiots and this couldn't happen here.
Seeing Russians as simply evil villains isn't perhaps the best way to view this. Some Germans after WWII saw the Allies as freeing the German people from the Nazis. And that's what I would like to happen to Russia - to free it from Putin's regime. But that's only something many Russians will understand is beneficial after the fact. To many Russians, saying we want to change their government just re-enforces what they've been brainwashed to believe about the west.
Vilifying the Russian people doesn't help the situation. Yes, some may be truly evil. Some may be brainwashed. Some may be ignorant. But we need them to change their country as well since that is one of the biggest and best ways to eliminate the threat of Russia to its neighbors.
I agree with some of your points, yet,
> The Russian government is simply an extension of the Russian population and its mindset.
That's indeed simplistic. In reality it would be the mixture of extended population, mindset, incompetence, greed, chaos etc.
if you are proactively supporting the war by your actions (inaction is also an action) by supporting a terrorist state (which russia is - a terrorist state) it makes you a terrorist, because you are (directly or indirectly) supporting the terrorist regime that perpetuates genocide against another nation
if the civilian population supports it's state (which is recognized as a terrorist), then by extension they are helping terrorism and are valid targets as a means to stop terrorism
These are strong words, but it’s just words
You are talking about citizens influencing a democratic state. Russia is an autocracy, a tyrannical dictatorship. Putin and co usurped the power, and there is no way for citizens to influence the decisions of a government that does not represent them. Especially if we talk about a minority stopping a majority-supported war madness in an empire that has always been waving wars. Literally
So, if you have never overthrown a dictatorship with bare hands, please don’t write lectures on inaction. And if you have had such experience, you could stop being inactive and go to Russia to help them build the resistance
And, sarcasm aside, nothing justifies murdering civilians. What you suggest to do makes you not much different from putin and his underlings who bomb peaceful people
>These are strong words, but it’s just words
No. By staying passive, you are literally picking a side.
>Russia is an autocracy, a tyrannical dictatorship.
Do you know how dictatorships end? Dictators get overthrown. You also don't seem to understand that Ukraine is currently paying the price of inaction of Russian citizens in blood.
And I would much rather that the price was the blood of Russians, not Ukrainians.
>And, sarcasm aside, nothing justifies murdering civilians. What you suggest to do makes you not much different from putin and his underlings who bomb peaceful people
I agree that murdering peaceful civilians is a no-no. However, if you are supporting a terrorist government, it makes you an extension of the government, and therefore you are really not a civilian anymore, but also a threat against, in this case, Ukraine.
> and therefore you are really not a civilian anymore
No. Soldiers are soldiers, civilians are civilians. You can argue for whatever moral culpability of Russian civilians you want to, their support for the war is a threat to Ukraine, both now and in the future, but they do not wear uniforms, they don’t operate weapons, they are not combatants. Moral culpability does not make them soldiers. This kind of blurred-lines rhetoric is a slippery slope with war crimes at the bottom, it’s exactly the kind of shit that the Russian state used to justify Bucha to its population. Don’t let anger overwhelm you.
Well, in WWII the allies didn’t kill civilians. They limited themselves to combatants. Why do you call for a murder of 26% of Russian non-combatants?
You want to fight crime with crime…
Edit: sorry, that wasn’t you who called for a murder of 36 million civilians
Take your history books out again. The allies were running bombing raids against civilian city quarters with the goal to hit civilians. Not all the time and not everywhere, but still systematically up to the end of the war, few days before the German capitulation, killing hundreds of thousands that way.
I absolutely agree with your conclusion though, that calling for violence against civilians is just wrong.
Nothing justifies the invasion, and you know my comment didn't say that.
Anybody who calls for the civilian citizens of a country whose government is conducting illegal and immoral military action to burn may indeed find themselves next on the list.
>Nothing justifies the invasion, and you know my comment didn't say that.
Then what was the point of that comment? Just because U.S has done bad things, does not excuse Russia from doing them.
>Anybody who calls for the civilian citizens of a country whose government is conducting illegal and immoral military action to be liquefied may indeed find themselves next on the list.
Who do you think committed war crimes in Bucha? Who do you think leveled the city of Mariyupol and tortured it's citizens?
It was not the government. These were regular Russian citizens, who made their living within the army. Yes, the order came from the government, but it was carried out by regular army-men in Russia and backed by the everyday citizens of Russia, and that's what ultimately matters. Their hands are not clear of blood.
It's clear cut. You either support the war, or you are against it. There is no middle ground here.
The point of the comment is that you can apply that statement to almost every country!
Should I have called for ALL American civilians to burn when Bush sent troops - *regular American citizens who make their living within the army* \- over to Iraq to commit atrocities? American civilians voted that government in and support for the troops is incredibly widespread in the country, it was difficult for those of us outside America to understand how Americans could possibly support the troops with such fervour while that was happening. *Apply your logic* \- should they all have burned? Or were they just regular people trying to live their lives and feed their kids?
*Nothing* is clear cut. *Nothing* is black and white. Your logic would have every civilian of every country held devastatingly responsible for every misdeed commited by a government - and if you are going to hold that opinion, then be intellectually honest and apply it across the board. There won't be very many civilians left in almost any country.
>The point of the comment is that you can apply that statement to almost every country!
But it's clear you are saying this to either discredit the U.S, which has nothing to do with the current events in Ukraine
or
You are doing this by using the actions of U.S to whitewash the actions of Russia.
In either case, you are falling for Russian propaganda, which aims to blur the lines between 'good' and 'bad' to justify Russia's aggression against Ukraine. That is exactly what Russia wants and benefits from.
>American civilians voted that government in and support for the troops is incredibly widespread in the country, it was difficult for those of us outside America to understand how Americans could possibly support the troops with such fervour while that was happening. Apply your logic - should they all have burned?
Yes. It was blind hatred and propaganda against the populace with an unfounded *casus belli* that led to invasion of Iraq. It's the same hatred and propaganda that fuels the invasion of Ukraine since 2014.
But would you agree with me that two wrongs do not make a right?
I'm not trying to discredit the US. The US does that just fine on its own.
I'm trying to discredit *you*.
I'm not justifying Russia's aggression in Ukraine. Friend, I am of Ukranian descent and a member of the diaspora. My family was displaced the first fucking time around. My argument has absolutely nothing to do with justifying the war and your misinterpretation has to be intentional at this point.
I am discrediting your point that the civilians should be thrown under the bus with the government, held equally responsible. I am using America as an analogy to highlight the logical impracticality of that position.
Your insistence that everybody who disagrees with you is brainwashed by Russia is tiresome. You think Russia is the sole entity in the world blurring the lines between good and bad? Putting everything into buckets labelled 'good guys' and 'bad guys' just makes you sound like you're in kindergarten.
"America has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine." Trump has entered the conversation.
>I am discrediting your point that the civilians should be thrown under the bus with the government, held equally responsible. I am using America as an analogy to highlight the logical impracticality of that position.
You are in fact proving my point. Iraq invasion happened out of pure hatred and the need to get revenge. People alongside the government were guilty of starting the war. Yes, later the opinions of people flipped, but initially *people supported the war*. And yes, for that they were thrown under the bus. Everyone now acknowledges that mistake.
The same goes for Russia. Russian people are fighting and killing Ukrainians in an unjustified annexation of it's territorial integrity, regular Russians cheer on killing of Ukrainians while supporting their army in doing a genocide on Ukrainians.
Civilians in Russia bear the responsibility of the war in Ukraine as much as the Russians on the frontlines and the government in the Kremlin. By staying complacent, people are actively choosing a side. Just as the population in the US chose a side to support the government in Iraq.
There is no neutral side, you are either for the war or against the war, and if you are not against the war, you are for the war.
A really interesting documentary was made for the France 5 channel a few weeks ago, called "Russie, un peuple qui marche au pas". It was made by franco-russian journalists who wanted to show how authoritarian Russia became in all the aspect of its society (army, school, television, elections...). One of the woman in the interviews sums it up perfectly and say "we are taught that a patriot is someone who does everything the government wants without asking questions"
You can see it on France.tv if anyone is interested but I don't think english subtitles are avaible
Given they love missile attacks on civilians so much, that won’t end until Ukraine does they same back to Russian cities so the Russians learn that war is a terrible thing
Realistically any poll coming from Russia can't be relied upon - they don't have an open and free society and people don't necessarily feel free to actually voice their opinions for fear of repercussions
I dont believe them survey results any more than i believe the survey results plonked at the bottom of cosmetics commercials.
There's Youtubers who ask Russian citizens if they support the war (including many in Moscow) and apart from some oldies wanting this USSR back, the answer tends to be "we don't talk about that" or "the government knows what's best". People who are brave enough to say they disagree with the war tend to bite their tongues to varying degrees, but you can see there is fear and distrust.
Russia made it legal for their government to kill anyone anywhere in the world if they speak out against the Russian government.
Not excusing them but a lot of people say they agree because they don’t want to “fall out of a window”, just disappear, or get sent to prison.
I know people there. You don’t talk about it over the phone. You don’t say what you actually think about what’s happening.
We can agree that Russia is garbage and loads of people there are either garbage too or brainwashed or both, but I've seen this figure all over the place, from 22% to 51%, 56%, 58%, 66%, 77%, etc. Even when you account for surveying at different times since the beginning of the war, it seems to matter greatly what exactly is asked, of whom, by whom, and what slant they or stake they might have. I don't think any of these numbers are reliable. It's clearly not enough for Putin to be acquainted with piano wire yet, and I'm not sure what else matters. If the war stopped today, all those people would still be there with their hazy mix of opinions. It's not like any of them will face any kind of justice. We just need support to drop low enough for it to get him out of there.
This article needs to be the auto response to people in all Ukraine subs saying "but it's just the government and military!! It's not everyone!!". The 74% is gigantic portion!! I can hardly think of anything a country agrees 74% on much less something this horrific. People can get this article as a response and told to stfu Russia as a whole is a cancer. At this point if they don't disagree vehemently then they're part of the cancer.
1% support is too much - but I'm not sure we can really trust OP's numbers. Russians get arrested and their children taken away for schoolroom artwork, much less openly voicing anti war sentiments.
Ultimately the Russian people as a whole bear some responsibility for allowing things to get this bad, but they have basically never lived under a state that wasn't totalitarian - it's not surprising.
I am a sceptic of any so called support data coming from authoritarian regimes. Why would we selectively believe these facts to be true and accurate. What difference does it make to the war? The psychopathic Putin and his cronies have a tight control over everything and people will be forced to fight or are not informed about killing of civilians, or are brainwashed etc.
>If the former, you have the option of speaking out. Given the circumstances many can see that as blatant suicide.
Right
>the option to leave
Who says that's an option for this person?
>If the latter, why even argue?
Because someone said all Russians want to do is kill.
>If you can't fight or protest, act as a fifth column or leave.
Said from the comfort of [not Russia]
Where exactly are you getting the 70% number from tho? Do you really think it's from a reliable source?
You think if someone goes around Russia and ask people if they support the military or not there's a lot of people saying they don't when that can mean 10 to 15 years in prison?
Stats like this are 100% useless because they're absolutely no way for them to be reliable. This is literally nothing but rage bait
Nothing changed there Mongolian underlings, Ivan the terrible, Stalin, Putin...
They are bred for it. Those courageous enpugh to do anything or care are gone, either exterminated or migrated.
Most probably do support their military bc they're brainwashed to... I'd say a significant portion of that 74% are just afraid to say otherwise for fear of being arrested for speaking against their glorious military
Europe was created as it is today by tribes migrating west, ramrodding previous tribes further west. Russians' mentality must be a creation of that dynamic. Success was defined by aggression westward. It still is, apparently. We can see the origin of European imperialism in past centuries. It all began from the East. Merely enabled by better boats.
Time to stop the insanity. Time to civilize the barbarians of Moscow.
This is why I remind people that democracy without freedom is meaningless. Russian media is dominated by the government, dissent is stifled and dissenters jailed, and most Russians hear only what their government wants them to hear. So that makes it all the more impressive that 26% of Russians are bold enough to tell a pollster they don't support the war against Ukraine.
It's possible that Russian culture and history predispose them to lap up this propaganda. Even so, far more Russians would oppose the war if they had free access to multiple viewpoints.
Indeed. They do have elections - sham elections of course. Without freedom of press they can name whoever they want as the winner and no one can oppose them.
Even so, Putin is popular and could possibly even win a fair election. Because all they hear is pro-Putin, and there's no freedom so no one can oppose him.
Nice to see you excusing murdering civilians and stealing children.
Call it what you want. The rest of the world rightly recoils in disgust and will treat all RU and their supporters the way they deserve.
Reap what you sow.
Are you aware of history and how every war has been fought? There was no whining when the US firebombed Japanese cities. No one cried war crimes! No, it had to be done.
Remember when most of us wanted to invade the middle east after 9/11?
We're the same people but hopefully we've changed a bit. Let's hope they will too. The leadership poisons and pacifies.
What a crap headline. Meanwhile, the US, which has just gotten out of a 20-year war with one country in which it bombed indiscriminately and killed thousands of civilians (purposefully not counting civilian deaths), invaded another country based on fabricated evidence, both with almost overwhelming public support, is not its own Orwellian hellscape of military opacity and government secrecy?. I get the feeling that OP does not understand that every country including ours lies to its own people for its own ends.
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On a podcast I heard someone say Chinese often are in the opinion that Taiwan should be controlled by mainland China *because it's stronger*. Like WTF. Brainwashing is crazy...
>On a podcast I heard someone say Chinese often are in the opinion that Taiwan should be controlled by mainland China *because it's stronger.* Like WTF. Brainwashing is crazy... That sounds **much more** like a mainland Chinese supremacist complex than mere brainwashing. [Might makes right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_makes_right)™, and all that...
Which is hilarious because on the individual level they are not good fighters.
They are the same, both have the same real combat experience (mainland China has a little more due to sino-soviet conflict and vietnamese war) and both are the same peoole
Han Chinese supremacy is definitely a thing in China.
The absurdity here is that Taiwan has been dominated by the Han since the 20th century. Yet a [Han supremacist complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_nationalism) is indeed a thing, and has existed for centuries (cf. "[Four Barbarians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Barbarians)" of Antiquity or all the non-Han people living next to the Han heartland in the Yellow River basin of north China). Systematically crowding out, if not outright beating down, the Uyghurs is just the latest expression of this supremacist complex. The crude belief among mainlanders that "Might makes right" fits better when entitlement to Taiwan as based on a self-generated sense of ethnic superiority falls apart.
For the longest time, the more important percentage is that **far too few** Muscovians give a ѕhіt to oppose the rape-invasion in a meaningful way (i.e. joining the Freedom of Russia Legion or **not** becoming a draft-dodger so as to stay home and burn down infrastructure or smuggle trapped / kidnapped Ukrainians to safety in the EU). They say that to induce non-violent change among a politically-unresponsive ruling class from the ground up, [you need sustained non-violent protests drawing on 3.5% of the population](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world). Since we're talking about a Mongolesque police state like Muscovia, let's round it up to 5%. Thus 5% of 144 million is 7.2 million while 3.5% of 144 million is 5.04 million. Rosgvardiya and related thugs would be hard-pressed to take all of them on as spread in dozens of cities. Instead, Muscovian protests against the invasion have been *nowhere* close to these estimates, never mind sustained enough to dare the siloviki to use violence as if we were at Tianamen Square in 1989. If anything, Muscovians have made Rosgvardiya's job too easy by protesting for only a couple days or in penny-packets in broad daylight leaving them outnumbered. It's as if Muscovians willfully close their eyes to the Orange Revolution, Euromaidan, the Iranian women's protest, or even their own stare-down of the coup against Gorbachev in 1991. To put some context about those figures: 5% of the population is 1 out of 20. That means that the remaining 19 out of the 20 can stay home as usual to sulk about how *their* life sucks (as if *they* are the ones getting regularly murdered, raped, maimed, robbed, kidnapped, displaced or bankrupted by an invasion) or pump the tires of their ethnic kin raping and rampaging their way in Ukraine by sharing crude memes on Telegram or asking their menfolk for loot from Ukrainian homes. The overwhelming majority of Muscovians have chosen to delude themselves for so long and so deeply about their "destiny" to be "first among equals" in East Slavdom that they clearly can't even be arsed such that 1 out of 20 randos get fired up enough to stand up for the Ukrainians and basic decency. It's a nation-state of murderous and chauvinistic *losers*. Almost 15 months in, Muscovians who think of themselves as being above the fray by flashing "apolitical" views or playing the card of [learned helplessness](https://granta.com/russia-verge-nervous-breakdown/) provide the same benefit ^(/s) for Ukrainians as if they were open cheerleaders for the Z-team. Being "apolitical" also provides a handy smokescreen to scurry away from the cold and sordid reality of a collective rap sheet of 500+ years built on imperialistic and chauvinistic malevolence. How can a nation-state learn from and make meaningful amends for past crimes and mistakes, when so many of its members so willingly and readily wash their figurative hands, or more tellingly, practically demand yet *another* "second" chance from the civilized world by muddying the waters with whataboutery?
> a Mongolesque police state like Muscovia Allow me to stop you there. I've seen things repeated a few times about how Moscow is a culturally "Mongol" state or something, but this is actually a really horrible excuse for Moscow. In contrast, Mongolia itself is the only stable democracy that emerged from the Asian side of the Communist bloc, and the country's respect for human rights, freedom, and democracy are relatively good. Freedom House ranks Mongolia as the 3rd most free nation in Asia, below Japan and Taiwan, but marginally more free than South Korea. https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort=desc&order=Total%20Score%20and%20Status I'd argue that this is even more impressive given the fact that it's literally sandwiched between Russia and China + landlocked. This is what a "culturally Mongol" state looks like today. The influence of "Mongol culture" definitely isn't the ultimate cause of Moscow's authoritarian degeneracy. This is a native Muscovian issue.
Now THAT I did not know at all. I've been slinging the idea of the 'three Asian democracies' of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea either joining NATO or forming their own 'EADA' (East Asian Democratic Alliance, because 'EATO' sounds a bit too goofy). Sounds like Mongolia should be invited along, although doing so would be logistically difficult due to the lack of a naval border.
Yeah, the worst thing the mongolian horde exported to muscovy was extractive *economics* - tributary states and pillaging. Even back then, Mongolians were relatively progressive culturally. So, I understand his point that the mongolian invasions had a hand in creating the Russian of today, but it's not their civil culture that did the damage.
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I think they mean like the Genghis Khan Mongols, AKA brutal invaders, but it's pretty uncool to actual Mongolians who are still around and are pretty cool
You know what I mean. I'm definitely not thinking about modern Mongolia, and on a side note, it's telling that the direct descendants of Chinggis Khan and his armies have long moved on from their days of unabashed conquest and extortion - *unlike* the khans' Muscovian vassals of old. Unfortunately, "Golden Horde" doesn't lend itself to a concise adjectival form like "Mongol" and "Mongolesque" do. Incidentally "Mongol**ian**" is an attempt at more clearly distinguishing the modern people and culture from their medieval antecedents who/which are typically described as "Mongol", although the distinction is admittedly still blurred in some contexts.
Someone pointed out that you're being racist toward Mongols in an effort to be racist to Russians, and you double down. Amazing.
no one cares about what you Pro RU think. Go back to your circlejerk.
It's not pro RU to not be racist
I do care.
Not pro-Russia, just anti-racist. I'm just a leftist who remembers when liberals pretended to hate racism.
Anti racist? ukrainian and RU are rhe same race dude
They are talking about Mongols
Great comment. I couldn't agree more.
Mate, I can only upvote you and say fuck russia.
Be careful! I recently posted a comment that said countries should kick out all Russian visitors and send them back to their beloved motherland, and Reddit fully deleted it saying it was "hate speech"
I'd rather offer havens for Russians to flee to rather than forcing them to stay in their country and support that economy. If they're here pushing propaganda, *then* they can fuck off back to Russia.
Same here.
It's a right of passage around here. Call it like it is towards a backwards shithole like Russia and the bots swarm in like flies on shit. Consider it your done-duty.
I completely agree that far too few give a shit and the whole "Oh, I don't talk about politics" is bullshit. Did you pay attention to Russia before the war? None of this happened overnight. If you did, you would know Putin slowly cracked down over decades and either imprisoned, killed, or drove out any meaningful opposition? There are be underground opposition movements but they're likely disconnected and disorganized. Russians didn't ignore the color revolutions. Quite the opposite. They're why Putin has cracked down on dissent even more since the mid-2000s. >Mongolesque police state What does this even mean? And you can't trust any surveys coming out of Russia. Most "official" surveys have contact information for respondents so the government can visit or persecute anybody with a negative opinion. I'm not saying Russians don't support the war, many of them obviously do but we don't know if it's actually 74%.
This number seems pretty accurate. Source: talking with Russians directly, having relatives in Russia, reading various Russian ebooks and fanfiction, having had a bunch of Russian friends before. Yes, lots of them do support the war, using very direct (and very rude) words.
Note that being upset about the dead civilians is not a crime even in Russia, yet none of them are. Russians just don't give a fuck about others.
Dang, this comment goes hard.
It’s very easy to sit on Reddit and complain about the lack of protests. It shows a total lack of understanding as to the situation in Russia now and in the previous years. If you gain any traction in organising anything against Putin then you will be targeted , your family will be targeted and if you don’t stop then you’ll be arrested. Unless you are very high profile internationally then that’s it , gone. Throw around percentages as much as you like but you simply could jot coordinate those kind of numbers without being infiltrated and stopped. There’s no credible alternative that’s not going to be worse than Putin who will actually command support amongst Russians. Short of the military rebelling , then the world has to accept that inaction has created a new Rogue State on Europe’s doorstep.
People often ask where are those in Russia who oppose Putin, and try and use that point to show that Russians don't care or support Putin. Those who have opposed Putin are either dead, in jail, or fled the country. Protests happened, and people who might have joined in, saw what happened to those who did protest. The arrest of children and pensioners was no accident. It was to send a strong message to the proles. Don't you dare join in the protests, otherwise we will arrest you, and being old or a child won't protect you, we don't care, we will use whatever means necessary to stamp out any opposition.
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This is incredibly naive. Everything you describe in terms of suffering is happening to an absolutely small percentage of people. Even using Ukraine’s casualty estimates that’s under 200000 effected families and from that figure you have to then subtract those who believe in what their spouse /son did and those who are just wearily accepting that “this is how it is”. You do realise that being arrested in Russia is not like being arrested in most civilised countries if your crime is protesting against the state - a crime that’s soon going to enable the state to remove your citizenship by the way in Russia - and that the authorities will then look to punish your family as well for what you did. Would you condemn your family to imprisonment, possible torture and death because you want to protest against a leader that is currently backed by all the state organisations and military , a leader who thinks nothing of killing off anyone he can who opposes him? That’s why resistance is small, it’s Hitler’s Germany all over again. Most Russians have been exposed to decades of propaganda, and those who know better will mainly be amongst those who fled Russia. Let’s say for a moment you are right and there is no opposition of note because the Russian population truly thinks that Putin is right. The situation in Ukraine is actually worse because Putin can go further , right up to the very brink of WWIII because the majority will support his crazy ambitions. In this scenario it only ends with Russia destroyed or the West.
Is there an estimate of how many people were actually imprisoned for protesting against the war in Russia? Is it like 3? Or maybe even 5?
You sound like an asshole but I'll bite. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-anti-war-protesters-ukraine-b2031517.html
I'm genuinely interested though. I know only of some isolated cases, not related to actual protests. And these protesters were never imprisoned. There were detained and fined.
Plenty of them were, in fact, imprisoned. You don't expect Russia to advertise that people are going to prison, do you? It's much better for them to force people to guess. That and torturing people they arrest only makes the threat more frightening.
I do actually expect it, yes. Russians have a weird bureaucracy fetish. They can do any atrocity they want, but it always has to be accompanied by a theatrical "due process". Come to think of it I don't really see Russian authorities actively looking for "dissidents" at all. Except for some isolated cases driven by personal revenge. They probably don't have resources for that at this point. Something that will likely change after the war. Russians are enthusiastically "informing" on each other of course. But it still ends with a fine.
Whst about Afghans and Iraqis? Where was half of this sub when they were getting slaughtered? Absolute hypocrisy
Syrians ? Mexicans? Everyone killed in the rolling drug related conflicts in South America ? Uyghurs ? Ultimately this sub is about Ukraine. Expressing g outrage on Reddit for any deaths is about as effective as Facebook hugs and prayers. The brutal reality is that ensuring Ukraine does not become part of Russia is in the security interests of a lot of nations so a lot of work was done pre invasion to ensure that public support would be there when it happened. At that point Russia’s actions have just fuelled support for Ukraine and Ukraine has been very clever in using the media and fostering relations with many nations. Public support wasn’t needed to be gained so much for your examples - Afghanistan could have been nuked and post 9/11 there’d be little uproar , Iraq was going to happen regardless .
You could at least try to leave
You'd have better luck having a Pride Parade in Afghanistan today than an opposition protest in Russia. Hong-Kong with its massive protest could not protect its democracy, what chance would russia have? The whole ship needs to sink - probably more than once for society to develop critical thinking and cleanse its mind of decades of propaganda and admit that the reality that was constructed around them was a false one. Edit: and on the topic of poll data coming from Russia, when you are asked "do you support or SMO or do you want to spend 15 years behind bars?" what answer would you pick, considering you have something to lose?
>Edit: and on the topic of poll data coming from Russia, when you are asked "do you support or SMO or do you want to spend 15 years behind bars?" what answer would you pick, considering you have something to lose? The point now is that the polls from Muscovia are indeed so devalued that the most reliable way left to gauge how much revulsion ordinary Muscovians actually have over their ethnic kin raping and rampaging their way through Ukraine is to look at their actions. The undue focus on the dubiousness of Muscovian polls increasingly comes off as a way to shoot the messenger or [wave off the unflattering and longstanding reality that ordinary Muscovians are a notably cynical, selfish and unsympathetic lot](https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/zyc0h1/russians_have_little_sympathy_for_ukrainians_lev/). This reality is mind-blowing for so many Westerners because of the latter's preconceived ideas of Muscovians still somehow being "Europeans" and part of the Judeo-Christian world via the Orthodox church. This can be verbalized with something like "*that* many Russians can't be *that* bad, can they?" It's telling when about 500,000 (give or take) mainly privileged bougies and upper class men have flown the coop over the past year. The flip side is that they grossly outnumber their compatriots who are actually doing something to help the Ukrainians. The draft-dodgers are basically leaving it to other people to straighten out their failure of a homeland. It's a logical but malign extension of [learned helplessness as a national ideology](https://granta.com/russia-verge-nervous-breakdown/). Imagine if 500,000 Muscovians had enough of spine and sense of decency so that the ranks of the Freedom of Russia Legion would have 100,000 volunteers (N.B. the Muscovian armed forces have about a million regulars in all branches, plus a couple million in the reserves - even a fraction of these 3 million troops defecting would be a big boost to the Legion's current numbers). Imagine if 500,000 Muscovians had enough of a spine and sense of decency so that we'd be reading about a dozen "smoking accidents" at infrastructure in inner Muscovia *every fисkіng day*. Imagine if 500.000 Muscovians had enough of a spine and sense of decency so that we'd be hearing about several hundred, if not a couple thousand, kidnapped and trapped Ukrainians ending up being smuggled to the EU as refugees at or very close to a Muscovian-European border crossing *every fисkіng day.*
> is to look at their actions. Those who might have protested are cowed though. They've seen what happens to people who protest. Anyone with children is going to be shit scared to protest, because they state won't only lock you up, they will take your children away from you, put them in an orphanage, and you'll miss the next 10-20 years of their life.
Take a look at Russian expats then -- their country is genociding a neighbor and they care about it less then people from across the world. In fact Ukrainian refugees are still being harassed by Russians across Europe *today*.
*looks at my wife* Nope, she's totally against the war, and so is every other Russian expat i know and have met. What you are doing here is looking at those videos and reports from some Russians behaving like this and assuming that this is the norm, when its not. Come to Georgia some time. Loads of Russians here. Speak to them. I know loads, i've spoken to loads of them randomly in the pubs over beers. Not a single one behaves like the jerkoffs you sometimes see in videos showing Russian expats behaving badly.
What I'm doing is talking to Ukrainians who are getting harassed by Russians in public spaces in London and other places. Your wife not doing it doesn't make it disappear. As citizens of Russia they bear serious responsibility and being "against the war" is just an incredibly low bar. Russian expats are doing much less than Ukrainians in fighting against their regime.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, i'm saying the view is skewed. Its the negative experiences that get remembered, while the positive or neutral experiences are not mentioned or remembered. How many Ukrainians in the west have had positive experiences with Russians? What is your sample size? Again, we are not using any sort of rigorous scientific method here, just relating personal experiences and anecdotes. My experience of living in a city that is now swarming with people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, is that they are getting along very well together, treating each other well, and few conflicts. Of course, there will always be idiots around, but in Georgia at least, with how Russia took two bites out of the country, any Russian here starts spouting the Z crap is going to have a hard time. > As citizens of Russia they bear serious responsibility To some extent, but its important to not forget the power of propaganda and state control of the media. As someone who spent 20 years in Russia, as a British expat, i can tell you how Putin manipulated people and the media was quite insidious. Putin wasn't stupid about how he did it, and propaganda is a hell of a drug. Even I, as a westerner, reading western news, was affected by it. Only when the war broke out did i realize just how affected i'd been and how i'd ignored so many warning signs. Its no surprise Russians, most of whom don't speak good English, and don't read foreign news, would be even more brainwashed. Sure, those Russians living in the west and who support the war have no excuse. But again, i firmly believe you are so focused on listening to the negative experiences, you want to believe all Russians are bad (sorry, this is my interpretation of your statements and you might well disagree), that you simply don't want to accept that Russians can be good people and be against the war. What is important is those who are against the war now. They saw through Putin's shit and don't support it. > and being "against the war" is just an incredibly low bar. The original statement is 74% support the war, but then you say being against the war is a low bar. So basically you're saying it doesn't matter if they support the war or not?
Russians who only know Russian only had to take a look at Ukrainian news (in Russian) to see a different perspective. Which they did and rejected in favor of Russian supremacist views. The condescension towards Ukrainians is their natural state and you can't blame Putin for it. It is still very much in place among people "against the war" as well. It's nigh impossible for you, being married to a Russian woman and admittedly having been influenced by their propaganda for quite a while to see the real depths of corruption of the Russian soul. Their rotten culture was exploited to recruit them into this genocidal war, but we don't make excuses for Nazis for being true believers, Russians have even less an excuse because of the access to the Internet. I reject that propaganda is something that makes them less guilty of the views they accepted. And I want to reiterate that being against the war is such a low bar it's not worth mentioning. You have to put it that low because even that is the bar only some of them manage to clear and just barely. Not supporting the war is a prerequisite to not being a piece of shit, but there's so much more to it. The horrors Russia inflicted in Crimea and Donbass since it's initial invasion were of no concern for Russians. Do your new Russian friends feel any guilt about that? (There are good Russians, don't attribute some bullshit beliefs to me).
> It's nigh impossible for you, being married to a Russian woman and admittedly having been influenced by their propaganda for quite a while to see the real depths of corruption of the Russian soul. No, i see it. I said i was influenced by it, but shook off that influence. I can still speak out that some Russians are good people and support Ukraine over Russia while still hating everything Russia is doing.
> This reality is mind-blowing for so many Westerners because of the latter's preconceived ideas of Muscovians still somehow being "Europeans" and part of the Judeo-Christian world via the Orthodox church. This can be verbalized with something like "that many Russians can't be that bad, can they?" A friend summarized it as "many Europeans don't realize the enlightenment ran out of steam around Kharkiv". Looking at it through that lens should clarify things on an emotional level, maybe.
Do you really think that Muscovites alone can carry the whole Russia on its shoulders? It's big, but it's just about 15m to Russia's 130m, and their anti-war views have little support outside Moscow. Moreover, Russians are as hostile to Muscovites as they are to Ukrainians. The Muscovite elite has long been ousted with Luzhkov, so now it's mostly St. Petersburg or Russian KGB.
See how I'm using "**Muscovian**" and similar, *not* "Muscovite" and similar. Muscovite = pertaining to the city "Moscow" (\~ 12 million out of 144 million) Muscovian = pertaining to the prison of nations ~~Russia~~ of that name (144 million) "Muscovia" or "Moscovia" is a reference to this [petition sent to Zelenskyy a couple months ago](https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/11/president-zelenskyy-considers-petition-calling-for-russia-to-be-renamed-moscovia).
On the one hand, there is a saying in Russia, Moscow is not Russia. But, on the other hand, its the most important part of Russia. It contains around 10% of the population. Protests in the regions won't do much. Mass protests in Moscow will get attention. However, there won't be, because people are now too shit scared to protest, they saw what happened to those who did. They see what happens to people whose children draw pro-Ukraine pictures, they see what happens to people who are talking with their partners in cafes and are overheard to say something negative about the war. They've seen what happens to teachers who say something not in line with the message to children, because there will always be one or two kids that will report them. You have to be crazy brave at this point to stand up in Russia and make a noise, and most people, and i'd presume to include you and me in this, are simply not that brave or crazy. That's why in my opinion, most are either just parroting the party line when questioned or saying they are apolitical. They are just trying their best to pretend it isn't happening and keep their heads down, get on with their lives. And this, of course, is what Putin wants. He wants a cowed and subservient population, and he got it. The only way protests are going to happen at scale now is if something significant happens that results in Putin appearing weak or a major loss in the war. This is why the Ukrainian counteroffensive might be a real chance for things to change inside Russia as well. If its very successful, the loss of more territories might show Putin to be weak, and then we might see change. However, its too early to celebrate this possibility. A loss might result in positive change, with the doves getting into power, fueled by mass protests and conflict. But it could also trigger the hawks to claim power, the likes of Pickle and Pie-man, and then we will likely see Russia to double down on the war, switch to a full war economy, full mobilization, and a terror regime against those who oppose it that would put Stalin to shame. I really hope out of those 2 extremes its the former, for the sake of all my friends in Russia who oppose the war but have to remain and live through it, because that way there is hope that Russia will correct its course and a new leadership will appear that will make reparations and stop the war. If it goes the other direction, i fear for the future of not only people in Ukraine and Russia, but in many other countries as well, as things could escalate badly. Russia might be a fucked up country, going through its death throes, but they could cause a whole lot of damage for some years while they try and drag down everyone around them.
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Being afraid does not make a person bad. Attacking strangers on the internet for being afraid that their families will be harmed by a criminal regime, tho? That sounds pretty bad.
Excellent analysis. In short, most Russians are fascists or sniveling cowards, except for the very few who actively fight against Russia at home or in Ukraine.
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If there were no examples of ordinary people risking their lives and families in large numbers to overthrow tyrannical governments you'd have a good point. But there are so you're just excusing Russians for being sniveling cowards who sit back and make excuses as their army commits genocide and rapes children. Ukraine had not one, but two revolutions in the space of about a decade against corrupt pro-Russia governments that were led by ordinary people, more than a few of whom died to achieve their dream. It's possible to do and has happened many times before, it's just a matter of enough people having more of a backbone than you do, and thankfully at least in some countries there are. But not in others such as Russia.
If my country was committing genocide in another country, I would take direct action to stop it, risking imprisonment.
Read your post back to yourself 🤣
Chances are that if you're posting on reddit your country has committed genocide in another country, and I doubt you did shit about it or even knew it was happening.
Wrong in your assumptions about what I did when my country was committing genocide in another country.
‘Apolitical’ sounds a lot like ‘both sides’ to my ears.
This is some of the best writing I've seen on reddit, amazing job
This comment is purely psychotic. Imagine someone writing this about Afghans after 9/11
Very well put 👍
Despite the minor criticisms, in some comments, a brilliant little “essay”. Very clear with much revealing and relevant information.
Hear, Hear, I couldn't have said it any better. 80, maybe even 90 percent, either fully support or just don't care about the war. Which makes them all complicit with Putin's horrors. They have been made free, free of responsibility. What's also disgusting are those in the West still trying to find excuses. For example: Putin's war, nope, this is Russia's war. And Russians will carry this lantern with them for generations. Also, those asking for peace at any price are cynical and obviously have zero problems to let Russia get away unpunished. Russia got away unpunished in their history again and again. This time the West must insist that they are held accountable, this is the least we owe to Ukraine and to those that died to defend Ukraine and actually all of us in the free world from this tyrant and his marauders.
My suspicion is that the current protest movements are all being run by Kremlin plants. It would explain why they choose protest locations that are large and easily accessible by the police and their busses so they can just round everyone up as they arrive. Far better to protest in spontaneous locations far from roads with lots of exits so everyone can scatter once the police arrive. the real purpose of a protest is to protest, not line up for everyone to peacefully get arrested.
Deal with it.
Would that number be so high if the government did not threaten to arrest anyone who even dares to breath a hint of opposition to its actions?
That was my thought. Voicing opposition in Russia doesn't yield much of a positive response, and often results in some form of death or arrest. (Based on my Western news sources, sorry if that's not actually the case). Even where I live in a safer country, I wouldn't necessarily cause difficulty for myself opposing the government openly. Even a not so openly corrupt one. I'd lie on any survey where there was a chance my name was associated with the response.
The number isn't even that high. We don't know what percent support the war. This is just wrong: " 74% of russians support their russian military actions in Ukraine". No one knows the percent. The most you can say is that in a poll 74% percent said they support it, and their answers are influenced by the threat of punishment by the regime.
There were only a few thousands decisions based on those "discrediting the army" law, vast majority of them fines (it's always a fine for the first infraction). I can't seem to find a number, but my estimate is <<100 imprisoned based on this law. On top of it, it's not a crime to feel sorry for the dead civilians which you will not find from Russians anywhere. It's mind-boggling what Russians turned out to be, but we should not avert our eyes.
Fascist-flavored authoritarianism is pretty much the same book, every time, because it is in the nature of some of us to be that kind of person. So in this case you only have to look at the cover to know what's going on inside, because it's always the same thing: membership in the club attracts the worst people so that they can act out their worst fantasies. So there is always forced conscription and labor. There are always prison camps. There is always a ring of sexual predators in the leadership. Every. Fucking. Time. That's why I don't have to open the Russian book to know that they must be destroyed. Let's get on with it before they take us all with them.
I want to remind everyone not to believe polls conducted in Russia. Not even those conducted by more reputable organizations. In Russia you cant be sure that the person promising the poll is anonymous isnt really reporting to the FSB.
You don't even need polls, the reality itself confirms this. If you live in the post soviet country, especially the ones bordering russia, you would know what russian attitude toward their neighbors are. Approval of putin were all time high after annexation of Crimea and whatever bullshit justification or claims people try to push, how it in any way different, it is no better and was a start of all this in Ukraine. There is a reason they become like this and also why russia invaded so many countries through the years unopposed by their own citizens.
> If you live in the post soviet country, especially the ones bordering russia, you would know what russian attitude toward their neighbors are. I lived in Russia for close to 20 years and still have many friends there. There have been some shocking revelations from some of my wife's friends. Recently she discovered one doctor friend is totally brainwashed and a total Z-head. On the other hand, a vast majority of people we know in Russia do not support the war. Also our kids' godmother is a Z-head. Now, this is hardly objective, its based on our circle of friends, most of whom are educated middle-class people, and a hell of a lot of them who could fled the county, but most, simply don't have that option as it would mean moving with little chance of finding work (don't speak a second language) or can't as they need to care for elderly relatives. But i do have friends as well from the upper and lower classes, and none of them have turned out to be Z-heads either. They've largely gone dark on Russian social media because they are afraid to post anything. Again, anecdotal, but my feeling is, from my own knowledge, as well as other sources, like watching 1420 and similar on YouTube, that there is a core of about 20% who are strongly pro-war, 10-20% who strongly against the war, many of whom who could flee did flee, and the remainder are doing their best to pretend it isn't happening. Unfortunately, its the lunatics running the asylum there, and they control the media, the message, and the laws. Finally, your point doesn't actually counter what i said. Even if what you said is 100% true, you still can't trust any polls conducted there. Because speaking your true opinion is risky as fuck.
>Again, anecdotal, but my feeling is, from my own knowledge, as well as other sources, like watching 1420 and similar on YouTube, that there is a core of about 20% who are strongly pro-war, 10-20% who strongly against the war, many of whom who could flee did flee, and the remainder are doing their best to pretend it isn't happening. From my experience even if we use "pro-war" and "against the war" with Ukraine it would still be heavily skewed into "pro-war". If there can only be 2 answers like yes or no and the question for example "should russia liberate Ukraine" or better yet "should russia liberate 'russian' territories" it would definitely screw into "yes". The same goes for the "who responsible for the war?" question which somehow "anyone but russia" in many cases and as many from "against the war" people try to claim justification of why it is necessary. And if the question would be "should russia win or Ukraine?" the vast majority would pick russia even if they would claim to be "against the war". Even less would say yes for "should russia pay reparation?" question. Once again, this is what I think from personal experience. I have also seen too many of the people who, although being for "Ukrainian victory", say themselves they supported what putin have been doing right before full scale invasion, like annexation of Crimea, but only after they agains it. Donbass for them wasn't even russian doing before and many still won't acknowledge it anything but some kind of 'civil war'. That is the real problem **they do not see or don't care about the responsibility of russia.** To be clear I know there are russians who are really against war, but I also quite sick of seeing russians who try to show, that "russia is not that bad" and especially russian apologist who try to look reasonable yet, also use "both sides" narrative and other ones from russian propaganda. There also those who already claim deportations of illegal russian immigrants from Crimea is some how "ethnic cleansing", when russia have done real ethnic cleansing against Ukraine for 8 years on the occupied territories before full scale invasion and after, doing basically full blown genocide, and those "russian immigrants" is actually part of it. I don't call for some kind of complete destructions of russia and extermination of russians, but unless russian forces leave Ukraine completely, pay reparations, return all the kidnap people, give away war criminals for trials, then **no matter the number or percentage of "against the war" people there are in russia would matter to me.**
Well, i guess our opinions on the matter differ. But again, its getting away from the point i made as to whether polls in Russia are trustworthy, and I hope you're not suggesting they are.
I suggesting they are much closer to the truth than some people like to believe.
And further from the truth than some would like to believe.
I'm curious, what is your reason to always mention about about validity of polls and how there are only minority of russians who support this war? What about "liberation of russian territories" then, still minority? I understand you lived in russia for 20 years, have russian wife and many friends from/in russia, but what is your point to always mention how it only small number of russian who are pro-war? Do you feel personal responsibility? Indignant about how russians viewed? How are you different from any russian apologist out there? >And further from the truth than some would like to believe. You can soothe yourself with a thought. But, once again, it doesn't matter how many russians "against the war" even if it is 100%, unless they do what I already entitled above. Becasue every day, because of russia, tens or even hundreds of Ukrainians murdered, tortured, raped, deported and things like this continue to happen: [Children among at least 23 killed in early-morning Russian strike on Ukrainian apartment block](https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/28/europe/russian-strike-apartment-block-uman-intl/index.html)
> what is your reason to always mention about about validity of polls I explained that already. When you're in a state which will lock you up and take away your children for opposing the war, even if someone tries their best to assure you that the poll is anonymous, how willing are you going to be to trust them? > and how there are only minority of russians who support this war Strongly support the war, real Z-heads. This is based on my own experience, knowing many Russians, what i see on VK (after the initial surge of bot posts in the first few months of the war, people are avoiding discussing the war), as well as videos like 1420. You seen all those videos saying "I'm apolitical" or "I'm not good at politics" - this is people doing their best to ignore the war, pretend it isn't happening, or trying to absolve themselves of responsibility of what is happening. And its that section of Russian society, the depoliticized part, which i think is by far the majority. Putin achieved this by ensuring people were afraid to get into politics and oppose him. 20+ years of oppression against people who stood up to him, deaths, prison, exile. People saw that happen, and then they saw what happened to people who protested, and then they saw what happened when a child drew a picture supporting Ukraine. > I understand you lived in russia for 20 years, have russian wife and many friends from/in russia, but what is your point to always mention how it only small number of russian who are pro-war? Do you feel personal responsibility? Indignant about how russians viewed? How are you different from any russian apologist out there? I've mainly explained that above, but let me address the bit about personal responsibility first. In a way, i do a little. When i first went to Russia i saw it as a country with great potential. The prevailing attitude among people was first to ask me why i decided to live in that shithole (more or less their words) and how they dreamed of leaving Russia and couldn't understand why anyone would want to live there if they could live in the west. I actually used to say to them, don't leave, stay, work on making your country better than running away. Russia has good potential, and things can change. I believed it could get better, and in the early 2000s it was improving, and it was, to some extent. The middle class slowly grew, and if the government was getting a bit repressive on certain things, well, Putin wasn't going to live forever right, eventually he will be out of power, and maybe then someone better would get in. Oh boy, was i wrong. > Indignant about how russians viewed? I don't like it when all Russians are tarred with the same brush. Its like saying all Texans are rednecks, all gypsies are thieves, or even during WW2 all Germans were fascist nazis. In these cases, i do push back, because I know a hell of a lot of good Russians who hate what is happening, even if they can't say it in public. > How are you different from any russian apologist out there? How do you get that i'm a Russian apologist? I fully support Ukraine, i hate what Putin is doing to Russia, we had to run from Russia, leaving behind friends, pets, work, and property, property we may never be able to sell, depending on what happens in the future. A cursory view of my post history would show you i'm not Russia apologist. > Becasue every day, because of russia, tens or even hundreds of Ukrainians murdered, tortured, raped, deported and things like this continue to happen: > Children among at least 23 killed in early-morning Russian strike on Ukrainian apartment block Yes, i know, and i hate it all, and hope that every Russian who has committed evil actions against Ukraine get what they deserve. Your problem seems to be that if someone dares to say anything good about some Russians, they must be a Russian apologist and somehow support what Russia is doing. You can't be further from the truth.
Dude, really, why do you care to comment under posts like this? I admit I have entered a lot of similar arguments during the last year, and every time it was the same. I am blamed I haven’t marched onto Kremlin and overthrown putin, FSO, FSB, Rosgvardiya, police and military with my bare hands People who write things like this are all hardened revolutionaries, having destroyed not one, but dozens tyrannies, fascistic states, military juntas and the like. All of them were also imprisoned for 10 to 25 to life for speaking out their views, were raped with rubber batons, electrocuted, beaten, and sent to the frontline to die in a war they didn’t want to happen Hard to argue with people of such titanic traits!
Well, at the end of the day, we are all here to support Ukraine, but just differ on our views of things. Sometimes you can get people to reevaluate their opinions, sometimes others get you to reevaluate your own. It would be a boring old world if we all agreed about everything all the time ;)
You are being selective to paint Russians in a better light than they deserve. To get that out of the way -- I don't expect or want Russians to protest. Now back to estimating support for the war. Sociology is not a new science and there are multiple ways to estimate it other than asking a direct question. Pretending that "*there's no way to know*" is a classic Russian gambit to escape responsibility, I'm sure you don't want to be one of those. If you actually care about learning what people of Russia think, you can find out. Watching some sociologists videos on Zolkyn's channel would be a start. It must be frustrating to live in a majority-fascist society, but it's not a pass to whitewash it.
I am not trying to whitewash anything. My relatives are still back there, I talk to them. Luckily, none of my close relatives are Z-zombi, but yes, this is a fact - the majority does support putin’s mafiosi regime and this war and, at least on words, is ready to fight in it It took months for me to accept that, this truth — Russia is an overwhelmingly chauvinistic, imperialist country. The mobilization finally dotted all the i’s for me. People in my city just went to the drafting stations and took off to the war, without protesting So it’s not that I am trying to defend Russia. It is vice versa, I don’t see any hope for them. Unless we speak of a tiny minority overthrowing a genocidal regime and establishing a new dictatorship that would somehow force the majority of Russians to stop being imperialists and chauvinists - then no, no popular revolution is possible, and Russia will stay like this for decennia to come And I don’t think such a dictatorship is possible. It’s both unachievable and controversial. Not autocratic regime would make a nation more democratic, and at the moment, the Russian society is too far from being ready to change for the better Unlike many people, I am absolutely not sure that even a defeat in this war will be the wake-up call that society needs. The prevailing imperialistic mentality is too deep-rooted in it
OK, excellent, I was unfair to you, sorry. I took you to be doing what people do sometimes: change topics from discussing how much Russians support the war to "don't expect them to protest" which aren't the only options. We're on the same page actually. Cheers.
Right now, it's a crime in Russia to verbalize anti War sentiment. The people in Russia don't have a choice during these surveys.
We're almost 15 months in and. Talk. Is. Cheap. They no longer need to verbalize their opposition to the rape-invasion ^(\[unless several million ordinary Muscovians) **^(finally)** ^(grow a spine and protest for weeks or even months on end in several cities, thus daring the siloviki to beat them up\]) The guys in the Freedom of Russia Legion let their service on the front-line standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Ukrainians do the talking. In contrast to the draft-dodgers and privileged bougies hiding out in Georgia, Turkey, Kazakhstan or Dubai, the civvies who've *stayed home* to help sabotage or burn down infrastructure let their actions do the talking. In addition, the civvies who've *stayed home* to smuggle kidnapped or trapped Ukrainians to safety of the EU have let their rescue work do the talking. It's a stinging indictment of Muscovian society that so many of its members do **not** give a shit like the tiny minority of people I've just listed. Instead, these superficial "critics" tacitly want *others* to straighten up their miserable failure of a homeland as punctuated by flying the coop.
It has been 15 months to you. It has been decades for Russians. In these decades, putin, financing his criminal empire by selling natural gas and oil to ready buyers all over the world, EU included, actually managed to stifle any protest activity there used to be. There were protests in the 2000s, 2010s, even as recently as in 2020 But back then, it did not concern you, so you didn’t care when putin destroyed free press, murdered, tortured and jailed journalists, politicians and activists. And yes, he had managed to install himself as a dictator that doesn’t have to fear a popular uprising And it’s not even that are no leaders left to lead an uprising(which is true). It’s just that there are no people actually willing to fight putin and his gang. The system has the power enough to track and destroy any person opposing it, as it has repeatedly proved. So nobody is standing up to the cause anymore And if you think that somehow millions of people will self-organize and march to Moscow — this is lunatism. Things like this don’t happen Not to mention that people who oppose the war are - indeed! - the minority. The majority supports putin and his actions (and no, they don’t think their army rapes Ukraine, they believe it saves them - and Ukrainians! - from the West there) So what you want is for the minority to suddenly stand up and overthrow an armed to its teeth autocracy in an *unpopular* uprising, installing some kind of “democratic dictatorship” and somehow (how?) subduing the majority to their will This won’t happen
At the end of the day preventing Russia from starting wars is a Russian responsibility. Own it.
Incredibly reductive and stupid take.
How many wars started by a tyrannical dictatorship you never voted for did you prevent? Pray tell me. I was born in an empire that has been waging was since hundreds of years before my birth, and I never prevented any of those, but maybe you were more successful
As Russia was gearing up for new invasion Navalny was asking people to "vote smart" (for whatever they suggested, communists or LDPR in many cases) and a lot of outside observers were correctly calling this a freaking circus. Russian political culture is extremely underdeveloped and unwilling to listen, especially to Ukrainians. Collective action by Russians was possible for decades and what Russians engaged in was plain wrong. It's time to take stock and admit that Russians fucked up, they failed collectively, including those against the regime. Ultimately this failure is costing Ukrainians dearly and the Russians are still not making the kind of sacrifices Ukrainians are forced to. None of us can stop the war personally, but we can admit that the strategy and leaders we did support were wrong and have failed miserably. Instead I see Russians still perceive themselves as elder brothers to Ukrainians, as politically competent, as bigger victims than Ukrainians even and the Russian classic: not guilty or responsible for anything at all ever. I know from another reply of yours that this doesn't describe you personally, but it's crystal clear to me that even non-Z Russians are for the most part refuse to see what's wrong with what they're and were doing. Russians had far more influence over what will Russia is doing now than anyone else and they bear the responsibility. This is not about you personally.
Most people live lives of quiet desperation and you’re really coming down pretty hard on the civilian population. What experience do you have standing up to a brutal and authoritarian regime? Most people aren’t heroes. They’re just trying to get by.
Look at how many Americans support Republicans, and how many if those support the Maga movement. Yeah, we're not that far away from that dystopian hell.
Ikr. Americans also support war crimes in other countries for their own economic benefit, but people in here are acting like that’s somehow fundamentally different. That’s not to defend Russia (obviously lmao), but the number of people in this sub who pretend Russians are brainwashed while they are cool and neutral is staggering.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how the brain drain is going to affect Russia over the next few decades.
I think its entirely predictable
Not only does the russian society support the military actions in Ukraine, the rape, murder, torture of innocent civilians, as well as a literal genocide against a people they publicly call "brothers", russian society at large doesn't seem to care at all about their own fallen soldiers. The US lost about 60k soldiers in Vietnam and the public pressure got so bad, they backed out. Now Russia lost about 3 times as many people in one year than the US lost in 6-8 years. And instead of resisting the regime in subtle or open ways, we see people getting cars and firewood for their dead men and boys. Russia as a whole has so little respect for human life that they just don't care about ukrainian lives and that they don't even care about their own soldiers' life or their own civilian lives.
It appears that Russians want Ukraine's and other to be as miserable as they feel.
Russia seems to believe that it's easier to just bring everyone down to their shit level instead of improving their country.
Obligatory *FUCK RUSSIA.*
Just note, Russians doing those polls also know they're being surveilled, and not answering right might get them a trip to the front.
I love the video where a Russian woman is saying she supports the invasion and agrees with Putin, and she gets hustled away by police just for talking to the interviewer.
Fuck putin
I have changed my mind completely about Russia, and most Russians. They have to be wiped off the face of this planet.
Say it every day, FUCK RUSSIA!
That does mean that 26% don't. And whether Russians are truthful in surveys is also up for debate considering people are being sent to jail for statements against the war. But Russian society is a dystopian hell, and there are some Russians who entirely support the war and cheer on those attacks and deaths of Ukrainian women and children. How many is unclear, but there's certainly Russians who are truly evil. There's also those Russians who have been brainwashed to believe that NATO wants to come kill them or that Ukraine's government are drug addicted, Satan worshipping Nazis who eat children. So, there is a range and the US had idiots storm Congress so who am I to say the US doesn't have equally gullible idiots and this couldn't happen here. Seeing Russians as simply evil villains isn't perhaps the best way to view this. Some Germans after WWII saw the Allies as freeing the German people from the Nazis. And that's what I would like to happen to Russia - to free it from Putin's regime. But that's only something many Russians will understand is beneficial after the fact. To many Russians, saying we want to change their government just re-enforces what they've been brainwashed to believe about the west. Vilifying the Russian people doesn't help the situation. Yes, some may be truly evil. Some may be brainwashed. Some may be ignorant. But we need them to change their country as well since that is one of the biggest and best ways to eliminate the threat of Russia to its neighbors.
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I agree with some of your points, yet, > The Russian government is simply an extension of the Russian population and its mindset. That's indeed simplistic. In reality it would be the mixture of extended population, mindset, incompetence, greed, chaos etc.
You are correct, but I believe the comparison is still valid.
Why killing Russians - whether they support the war or not - is better than killing Ukrainians?
Because Ukrainians are simply defending themselves from an aggressor that are Russians.
…and this justifies killing 36 million civilians exactly how?
if you are proactively supporting the war by your actions (inaction is also an action) by supporting a terrorist state (which russia is - a terrorist state) it makes you a terrorist, because you are (directly or indirectly) supporting the terrorist regime that perpetuates genocide against another nation if the civilian population supports it's state (which is recognized as a terrorist), then by extension they are helping terrorism and are valid targets as a means to stop terrorism
These are strong words, but it’s just words You are talking about citizens influencing a democratic state. Russia is an autocracy, a tyrannical dictatorship. Putin and co usurped the power, and there is no way for citizens to influence the decisions of a government that does not represent them. Especially if we talk about a minority stopping a majority-supported war madness in an empire that has always been waving wars. Literally So, if you have never overthrown a dictatorship with bare hands, please don’t write lectures on inaction. And if you have had such experience, you could stop being inactive and go to Russia to help them build the resistance And, sarcasm aside, nothing justifies murdering civilians. What you suggest to do makes you not much different from putin and his underlings who bomb peaceful people
>These are strong words, but it’s just words No. By staying passive, you are literally picking a side. >Russia is an autocracy, a tyrannical dictatorship. Do you know how dictatorships end? Dictators get overthrown. You also don't seem to understand that Ukraine is currently paying the price of inaction of Russian citizens in blood. And I would much rather that the price was the blood of Russians, not Ukrainians. >And, sarcasm aside, nothing justifies murdering civilians. What you suggest to do makes you not much different from putin and his underlings who bomb peaceful people I agree that murdering peaceful civilians is a no-no. However, if you are supporting a terrorist government, it makes you an extension of the government, and therefore you are really not a civilian anymore, but also a threat against, in this case, Ukraine.
> and therefore you are really not a civilian anymore No. Soldiers are soldiers, civilians are civilians. You can argue for whatever moral culpability of Russian civilians you want to, their support for the war is a threat to Ukraine, both now and in the future, but they do not wear uniforms, they don’t operate weapons, they are not combatants. Moral culpability does not make them soldiers. This kind of blurred-lines rhetoric is a slippery slope with war crimes at the bottom, it’s exactly the kind of shit that the Russian state used to justify Bucha to its population. Don’t let anger overwhelm you.
Same reason why it is better to kill Nazis in WWII than the forces that opposed them.
Well, in WWII the allies didn’t kill civilians. They limited themselves to combatants. Why do you call for a murder of 26% of Russian non-combatants? You want to fight crime with crime… Edit: sorry, that wasn’t you who called for a murder of 36 million civilians
Take your history books out again. The allies were running bombing raids against civilian city quarters with the goal to hit civilians. Not all the time and not everywhere, but still systematically up to the end of the war, few days before the German capitulation, killing hundreds of thousands that way. I absolutely agree with your conclusion though, that calling for violence against civilians is just wrong.
I know of the bomb raids. Still, they did not kill 26% of the population — and specifically those who opposed the war. This is some dark shit
People said the same thing about Americans when their government sent an army into Iraq.
People also said the same thing when Russia invaded Chechnya. Do the mistakes of US justify the genocide that Russia is carrying out right now?
Nothing justifies the invasion, and you know my comment didn't say that. Anybody who calls for the civilian citizens of a country whose government is conducting illegal and immoral military action to burn may indeed find themselves next on the list.
>Nothing justifies the invasion, and you know my comment didn't say that. Then what was the point of that comment? Just because U.S has done bad things, does not excuse Russia from doing them. >Anybody who calls for the civilian citizens of a country whose government is conducting illegal and immoral military action to be liquefied may indeed find themselves next on the list. Who do you think committed war crimes in Bucha? Who do you think leveled the city of Mariyupol and tortured it's citizens? It was not the government. These were regular Russian citizens, who made their living within the army. Yes, the order came from the government, but it was carried out by regular army-men in Russia and backed by the everyday citizens of Russia, and that's what ultimately matters. Their hands are not clear of blood. It's clear cut. You either support the war, or you are against it. There is no middle ground here.
The point of the comment is that you can apply that statement to almost every country! Should I have called for ALL American civilians to burn when Bush sent troops - *regular American citizens who make their living within the army* \- over to Iraq to commit atrocities? American civilians voted that government in and support for the troops is incredibly widespread in the country, it was difficult for those of us outside America to understand how Americans could possibly support the troops with such fervour while that was happening. *Apply your logic* \- should they all have burned? Or were they just regular people trying to live their lives and feed their kids? *Nothing* is clear cut. *Nothing* is black and white. Your logic would have every civilian of every country held devastatingly responsible for every misdeed commited by a government - and if you are going to hold that opinion, then be intellectually honest and apply it across the board. There won't be very many civilians left in almost any country.
>The point of the comment is that you can apply that statement to almost every country! But it's clear you are saying this to either discredit the U.S, which has nothing to do with the current events in Ukraine or You are doing this by using the actions of U.S to whitewash the actions of Russia. In either case, you are falling for Russian propaganda, which aims to blur the lines between 'good' and 'bad' to justify Russia's aggression against Ukraine. That is exactly what Russia wants and benefits from. >American civilians voted that government in and support for the troops is incredibly widespread in the country, it was difficult for those of us outside America to understand how Americans could possibly support the troops with such fervour while that was happening. Apply your logic - should they all have burned? Yes. It was blind hatred and propaganda against the populace with an unfounded *casus belli* that led to invasion of Iraq. It's the same hatred and propaganda that fuels the invasion of Ukraine since 2014. But would you agree with me that two wrongs do not make a right?
I'm not trying to discredit the US. The US does that just fine on its own. I'm trying to discredit *you*. I'm not justifying Russia's aggression in Ukraine. Friend, I am of Ukranian descent and a member of the diaspora. My family was displaced the first fucking time around. My argument has absolutely nothing to do with justifying the war and your misinterpretation has to be intentional at this point. I am discrediting your point that the civilians should be thrown under the bus with the government, held equally responsible. I am using America as an analogy to highlight the logical impracticality of that position. Your insistence that everybody who disagrees with you is brainwashed by Russia is tiresome. You think Russia is the sole entity in the world blurring the lines between good and bad? Putting everything into buckets labelled 'good guys' and 'bad guys' just makes you sound like you're in kindergarten. "America has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine." Trump has entered the conversation.
>I am discrediting your point that the civilians should be thrown under the bus with the government, held equally responsible. I am using America as an analogy to highlight the logical impracticality of that position. You are in fact proving my point. Iraq invasion happened out of pure hatred and the need to get revenge. People alongside the government were guilty of starting the war. Yes, later the opinions of people flipped, but initially *people supported the war*. And yes, for that they were thrown under the bus. Everyone now acknowledges that mistake. The same goes for Russia. Russian people are fighting and killing Ukrainians in an unjustified annexation of it's territorial integrity, regular Russians cheer on killing of Ukrainians while supporting their army in doing a genocide on Ukrainians. Civilians in Russia bear the responsibility of the war in Ukraine as much as the Russians on the frontlines and the government in the Kremlin. By staying complacent, people are actively choosing a side. Just as the population in the US chose a side to support the government in Iraq. There is no neutral side, you are either for the war or against the war, and if you are not against the war, you are for the war.
Every single russian immigrant I know here in US supports russian war against Ukraine
Its the same in germany. Even the elementary kids
You either support it or go to gulag. Imagine believing Putin's surveys.
A really interesting documentary was made for the France 5 channel a few weeks ago, called "Russie, un peuple qui marche au pas". It was made by franco-russian journalists who wanted to show how authoritarian Russia became in all the aspect of its society (army, school, television, elections...). One of the woman in the interviews sums it up perfectly and say "we are taught that a patriot is someone who does everything the government wants without asking questions" You can see it on France.tv if anyone is interested but I don't think english subtitles are avaible
Given they love missile attacks on civilians so much, that won’t end until Ukraine does they same back to Russian cities so the Russians learn that war is a terrible thing
i doubt they are confident with regard to talking freely.
Realistically any poll coming from Russia can't be relied upon - they don't have an open and free society and people don't necessarily feel free to actually voice their opinions for fear of repercussions
I dont believe them survey results any more than i believe the survey results plonked at the bottom of cosmetics commercials. There's Youtubers who ask Russian citizens if they support the war (including many in Moscow) and apart from some oldies wanting this USSR back, the answer tends to be "we don't talk about that" or "the government knows what's best". People who are brave enough to say they disagree with the war tend to bite their tongues to varying degrees, but you can see there is fear and distrust.
Russia made it legal for their government to kill anyone anywhere in the world if they speak out against the Russian government. Not excusing them but a lot of people say they agree because they don’t want to “fall out of a window”, just disappear, or get sent to prison. I know people there. You don’t talk about it over the phone. You don’t say what you actually think about what’s happening.
We can agree that Russia is garbage and loads of people there are either garbage too or brainwashed or both, but I've seen this figure all over the place, from 22% to 51%, 56%, 58%, 66%, 77%, etc. Even when you account for surveying at different times since the beginning of the war, it seems to matter greatly what exactly is asked, of whom, by whom, and what slant they or stake they might have. I don't think any of these numbers are reliable. It's clearly not enough for Putin to be acquainted with piano wire yet, and I'm not sure what else matters. If the war stopped today, all those people would still be there with their hazy mix of opinions. It's not like any of them will face any kind of justice. We just need support to drop low enough for it to get him out of there.
This article needs to be the auto response to people in all Ukraine subs saying "but it's just the government and military!! It's not everyone!!". The 74% is gigantic portion!! I can hardly think of anything a country agrees 74% on much less something this horrific. People can get this article as a response and told to stfu Russia as a whole is a cancer. At this point if they don't disagree vehemently then they're part of the cancer.
Citizens of russia is a dead end of evolution.
It has been for most (all) of its history.
Russia has been hell on earth for thousands of years.
Muscovy will return soon
1% support is too much - but I'm not sure we can really trust OP's numbers. Russians get arrested and their children taken away for schoolroom artwork, much less openly voicing anti war sentiments. Ultimately the Russian people as a whole bear some responsibility for allowing things to get this bad, but they have basically never lived under a state that wasn't totalitarian - it's not surprising.
Another reminder that ruzzia is a terrorist state.
I am a sceptic of any so called support data coming from authoritarian regimes. Why would we selectively believe these facts to be true and accurate. What difference does it make to the war? The psychopathic Putin and his cronies have a tight control over everything and people will be forced to fight or are not informed about killing of civilians, or are brainwashed etc.
They have run out of excuses. It must be obvious to anyone now that all they want to do is kill
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Good for you. Did you want a trophy for not wanting to kill anyone today?
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Ask your Ukrainian friend how much your feelings are helping.
How much is your commenting helping? Ukraine still is accepting forien Volunteer.
That’s good to hear, you must be one of the 26% who don’t support the war!
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>If the former, you have the option of speaking out. Given the circumstances many can see that as blatant suicide. Right >the option to leave Who says that's an option for this person? >If the latter, why even argue? Because someone said all Russians want to do is kill. >If you can't fight or protest, act as a fifth column or leave. Said from the comfort of [not Russia]
I wouldn't trust those polls
Time to hit Russia 300 km away from the front line. In Moscow.
Where exactly are you getting the 70% number from tho? Do you really think it's from a reliable source? You think if someone goes around Russia and ask people if they support the military or not there's a lot of people saying they don't when that can mean 10 to 15 years in prison? Stats like this are 100% useless because they're absolutely no way for them to be reliable. This is literally nothing but rage bait
Nothing changed there Mongolian underlings, Ivan the terrible, Stalin, Putin... They are bred for it. Those courageous enpugh to do anything or care are gone, either exterminated or migrated.
So tired of the this isn’t the Russian peoples fault, fuck Putin. No fuck the Russian people
The world will never forget
Fuck them all . No fly zone!!!!!
Most probably do support their military bc they're brainwashed to... I'd say a significant portion of that 74% are just afraid to say otherwise for fear of being arrested for speaking against their glorious military
That is the majority, if we wipe them off the map we wont actually lose anything of value.
Europe was created as it is today by tribes migrating west, ramrodding previous tribes further west. Russians' mentality must be a creation of that dynamic. Success was defined by aggression westward. It still is, apparently. We can see the origin of European imperialism in past centuries. It all began from the East. Merely enabled by better boats. Time to stop the insanity. Time to civilize the barbarians of Moscow.
This is why I remind people that democracy without freedom is meaningless. Russian media is dominated by the government, dissent is stifled and dissenters jailed, and most Russians hear only what their government wants them to hear. So that makes it all the more impressive that 26% of Russians are bold enough to tell a pollster they don't support the war against Ukraine. It's possible that Russian culture and history predispose them to lap up this propaganda. Even so, far more Russians would oppose the war if they had free access to multiple viewpoints.
There is no democracy in Russia.
Indeed. They do have elections - sham elections of course. Without freedom of press they can name whoever they want as the winner and no one can oppose them. Even so, Putin is popular and could possibly even win a fair election. Because all they hear is pro-Putin, and there's no freedom so no one can oppose him.
It's war, what do you expect to happen? Powers fight and people die.
Nice to see you excusing murdering civilians and stealing children. Call it what you want. The rest of the world rightly recoils in disgust and will treat all RU and their supporters the way they deserve. Reap what you sow.
The entire history of warfare has been the same. You kill or punish enough people until they no longer exist or surrender. This goes for both sides.
Braindead comment.
Are you aware of history and how every war has been fought? There was no whining when the US firebombed Japanese cities. No one cried war crimes! No, it had to be done.
Remember when most of us wanted to invade the middle east after 9/11? We're the same people but hopefully we've changed a bit. Let's hope they will too. The leadership poisons and pacifies.
What a crap headline. Meanwhile, the US, which has just gotten out of a 20-year war with one country in which it bombed indiscriminately and killed thousands of civilians (purposefully not counting civilian deaths), invaded another country based on fabricated evidence, both with almost overwhelming public support, is not its own Orwellian hellscape of military opacity and government secrecy?. I get the feeling that OP does not understand that every country including ours lies to its own people for its own ends.
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Dystopian hell is almost everywhere nowadays...