About 10 civilians are believed to have been killed, including six in an air strike in Brovary near the capital Kyiv. A man was also killed in shelling outside the major eastern city of Kharkiv. There have also been reports of troops landing by sea at the Black Sea port cities of Mariupol and Odesa in the south. A British resident of Odesa told the BBC many people were leaving. Tanks and troops have poured into Ukraine at points along its eastern, southern and northern borders, Ukraine says. BBC correspondents heard loud bangs in the capital Kyiv, as well as Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Pro-government circles echo Putin’s line, but criticism of the military’s action grows among public figures and Russians. I really cannot understand why Russians don’t have the right to eat in McDonald’s. Of course, that may be a strange example, but I just mean those of us who are against war still suffer from it. Their town has been directly affected, so we are worried about them. Right now, they are relatively safe, but it’s a constant worry for my family. Elsewhere on the BBC The majority of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America do not support the invasion, but won’t do very much to punish Russia for it either. Vladimir Putin’s government has ramped up its already repressive policies during the Ukraine conflict, shuttering independent media outlets and blocking access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It’s now extremely difficult to get a sense of what either ordinary Russians or the country’s elite think about the war, as criticizing it could lead to a lengthy stint in prison. Perhaps most importantly, close observers of the war believe Russians are suffering from poor morale. Because Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine was kept secret from the vast majority of Russians, the government had a limited ability to lay a propaganda groundwork that would get their soldiers motivated to fight. The current Russian force has little sense of what they’re fighting for or why — and are waging war against a country with which they have religious, ethnic, historical, and potentially even familial ties. At demonstrations, people are detained for several days or fined. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, an outcry has arisen around the world. About 10 civilians are believed to have been killed, including six in an air strike in Brovary near the capital Kyiv. That means they're on conflicting sides — and feel the shunning of Russia most of all. It will drive a wedge between families whose members fight, and those whose run for the border or curse the war. According to recent opinion polls, conducted by pollsters such as the Levada Centre which has offices in Moscow, 70-75% of respondents in Russia support the war with Ukraine. (These surveys were conducted before Mr Putin announced his mobilisation drive.) But https://euronewstop.co.uk/who-voted-against-ukraine-joining-eu.html are deceptive. Public opposition to the war can result in criminal prosecution, so people who are critical of the war and the regime are less likely to agree to speak to a pollster. Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine On some level, the data likely reflect an impulse, whether born of fear or passivity, to repeat approved messages rather than articulate your own. Even before the war, Russia was not the kind of place where you willy-nilly shared your political beliefs with strangers, let alone with those who called out of the blue. To understand the nature and composition of the pro-war majority, you need to dig deeper. Russian state television—instrumental in shaping public opinion—serves all these audiences. We are measuring public attitudes that, more or less, coincide with how people will behave in public, he adds. Kirill Rogov on what Russians really think of the war in Ukraine “I know activists from other countries and they support Russian activists, but they don’t understand how we can continue to live and work under the war and the current government. There are likely many others who hate Russia, but it must be remembered that it’s necessary to separate the Russian government, a mad machine of repression and destruction, and the people of Russia, who for the most part are not guilty. Having a prosperous, modern, independent and democratic European state bordering Russia was perceived as posing a threat to Russia’s autocratic regime. If Ukrainians succeeded in fully reforming their country along lines of other western democracies, it would set a bad precedent for former Soviet countries and serve as an example for Russians who want a more democratic country. Examples of Yugoslavia and Libya, two states bombed by NATO forces, are used to drive fears that Russia may be next. On Thursday morning, Putin said he had authorised military action to defend itself against what he said were threats emanating from Ukraine. In Russia, state-run newspapers and media outlets blame the West for aggression, mirroring the Kremlin's language. The same thing with conferences – international events that take place in Moscow are all cancelled. Ukraine and Russia have significant, deep, and longstanding cultural and historical ties; both date their political origins back to the ninth-century Slavic kingdom of Kievan Rus. But these ties do not make them historically identical, as Putin has repeatedly claimed in his public rhetoric. … The media gives only authorized information, and the [country at large] 'absorbs’ losses,” she explained. And when it comes to Russian war casualties, Koneva said the losses have been successfully covered up by the country’s strict censorship measures. Some 38% of respondents reported the war “has reduced their options or ruined their plans.” Among them, 14% of respondents reported a job loss, 36% a decrease in income and 56% reported spending more savings on food. In a written response to questions, she said that despite the self-censorship, pollsters can usually have higher confidence in the reliability of poll findings that show some fluctuation over time. Those standing against Mr Putin in the upcoming election, including anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin, have until Wednesday to gather the required number of supporters' signatures to back their campaigns. Instead of getting into pitched large-scale battles with Russians on open terrain, where Russia’s numerical advantages would prove decisive, the Ukrainians instead decided to engage in a series of smaller-scale clashes. That the Kremlin was right to block the majority of independent media sites they used to read. Five days later, the Russian military swiftly seized control of Crimea and declared it Russian territory, a brazenly illegal move that a majority of Crimeans nonetheless seemed to welcome. In 2008, NATO officially announced that Georgia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics right on Russia’s doorstep — “will become members of NATO” at an unspecified future date. Meanwhile, Moscow has claimed its forces have taken control of the village of Tabaivka in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region. Many shout about it openly, but it doesn’t end in anything good. We really want to help, but we haven’t been able to solve problems even in our own country, and now requests are flying around that we stop the war in another country. We write about it on social networks, sign petitions, send money, go to rallies, but so far this hasn’t yielded any results, the government only hits us with a truncheon. In mid-March, Aleksei Miniailo, a former social entrepreneur and current opposition politician, oversaw another telephone survey with the aim of trying to capture the effects of fear and propaganda on survey data. And that figure came from among those who agreed to participate at all; Miniailo suspected that the polls were not capturing a majority of the real antiwar sentiment, whatever its size. In his mobilisation speech on September 21st, Mr Putin used choice rhetoric of the party of total war to persuade Russian citizens of the enemy’s proximity and the need to defend the motherland. Many commentators declared that this rhetoric would undermine the fragile support of the majority for the war. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said Russia had carried out missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and border guards, and that explosions had been heard in many cities. Ilya (name changed), who is in his early 30s, has just finished paying off his mortgage in Moscow. Many Western brands leaving Russia have paved the way for young entrepreneurs and new, high-quality Russian brands are thriving. And other specialised apps, like Matlab (a programming and computing platform) and Coursera (an online course platform). The European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Russia faces “unprecedented isolation” over its attack on Ukraine and will be hit with the “harshest sanctions” the EU has ever imposed. Germany, which has important trade ties with Russia and a post-World War II tradition of pacifism, is perhaps the most striking case. Nearly overnight, the Russian invasion convinced center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz to support rearmament, introducing a proposal to more than triple Germany’s defense budget that’s widely backed by the German public. On the surface, the world appears to be fairly united behind the Ukrainian cause. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion by a whopping margin (with 35 abstentions). But the UN vote conceals a great deal of disagreement, especially among the world’s largest and most influential countries — divergences that don’t always fall neatly along democracy-versus-autocracy lines. There is no doubt that NATO expansion helped create some of the background conditions under which the current conflict became thinkable, generally pushing Putin’s foreign policy in a more anti-Western direction. Similarly, turning the antiwar protests into a full-blown influential movement is a very tall order. Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.
https://euronewstop.co.uk/who-voted-against-ukraine-joining-eu.html
