Meanwhile, Moscow has claimed its forces have taken control of the village of Tabaivka in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region. War never leads to anything good and won’t this time either,” – says 18-year-old Tonya, wearing a bag with a hand-stitched No war sign. But even though justification of the Ukraine invasion can be found among Russians, there have been no demonstrations of support. It’s sunny, people are taking selfies on Red Square, while a long convoy of National Guard buses rolls by the Kremlin walls. Why Russians do not protest is perhaps better explained by Russian history and not opinion polls. I always pay with my phone but it simply didn't work. There were some other people with the same problem. It turned out that the barriers are operated by VTB bank which is under sanctions and cannot accept Google Pay and Apple Pay. State propaganda and fake news about Ukraine “shooting its own citizens in the Donbas region” started back in 2014 and since then has been increasing in its pace and volume. Was hatred a natural and ultimately inevitable response to the atrocities Ukrainians were being subjected to? A frank and constructive dialogue is expected to improve relations between states, the Ukrainian president's office said on its official channel on the Telegram messaging app alongside a photo of Mr Szijjarto, Mr Kuleba and Mr Yermak. This could see states like Poland and the Baltics decide to aid Ukraine on their own, which might leave NATO's eastern front vulnerable and cause a crisis within the EU and European NATO. If the US abandons the military alliance, it will fall to European countries to ensure a Ukrainian victory, Mr OBrien says. A prominent war expert has warned the US is on the verge of diminishing its support for or even withdrawing from NATO - and this could have catastrophic consequences for Europe. Hungary has signalled it is ready to compromise on EU funding for Ukraine - after Brussels reportedly prepared to sabotage its economy if it did not comply. Photos: Ukraine says it’s survived its ‘most difficult winter’ 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. Where I am, people typically express their opinion at rallies, on social networks and among their inner circle. Usually, people will spread the word about protests secretly. But everyone who wants to participate can easily find out about it. For example, in certain online communities, they’ll just post a single number (indicating a date) and everyone understands everything. But I don’t feel safe expressing my opinion, especially when I talk about it online or on the phone. Military kit also needs boots on the ground to operate it – hence Sir Patrick’s call for a “Citizen Army” to boost the regular Armed Forces. Whether people would be flocking into recruitment offices is open to question. According to a 2022 YouGov poll, only one in five Britons would volunteer for service in the event of an invasion. What Do Russians Think of Ukrainians, and Vice Versa? It's quick to set up, and you can be confident that you're making a significant impact every month by supporting open, independent journalism. As you may have heard, The Moscow Times, an independent news source for over 30 years, has been unjustly branded as a foreign agent by the Russian government. This blatant attempt to silence our voice is a direct assault on the integrity of journalism and the values we hold dear. To put it simply, before launching an offensive, it’s worth thinking about who will fight in that offensive and how willingly, and to what extent an active conflict will prompt people to rally around Putin. Balazs Orban, chief political aide to the prime minister, said Hungary sent a proposal to the EU over the weekend showing it was open to using the budget for the aid package if other caveats were added. But be we warriors or wimps, now is the time to start facing up to the prospect, says Ed Arnold, a European Security Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. Russian forces may try to push again along the entire front, at least to secure all of the Donbas region. 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. A major gulf in attitudes rose regarding Crimea, whose annexation was supported by 87 percent of Russians and opposed by 69 percent of Ukrainians. In Russia, both pro-Putin supporters and anti-Putin oppositionists like Alexei Navalny and Mikhail Khodorkovsky backed the annexation of Crimea. Seventy-nine percent of Russians linked that action to the revival of Russia as a great power and a return to Russia’s rightful dominance of the former Soviet Union. But 66 percent of Russians aged between 18 and 24 have a positive or very positive attitude toward Ukraine. “The Russians do not understand the real numbers of losses. … The media gives only authorized information, and the [country at large] 'absorbs’ losses,” she explained. 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. “The feeling of the inevitability of war from the life of Russians, the feeling that the war is now with us, and we are with this life, caused the emergence of new meanings of war,” Zhuravlev said. Polls have suggested that even though they are the least likely to support the invasion, many still back it. Finding out what young Russians really think about the war in Ukraine is not easy. For Russians this all brings back memories of what happened when President Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and people queued for hours to get cash. The Kremlin has said Russia expected these latest sanctions and is ready for them, although it has not said whether businesses will be given extra help, as they were during the pandemic. “My father has a very strange position – it seems that he simultaneously supports and does not support the special military operation. It’s not that she doesn’t know alternative information is out there, but that she doesn’t want it, lest her vision of the world come under threat. Does it change anything to know that many Russians oppose Putin’s war but are powerless to stop him, or to understand that others have been duped into supporting it through his hyper-nationalistic discourse? In contrast, during the same period, the percentage of Russians holding positive views of Ukrainians plummeted from 55 to 34 percent. We must understand that polls show us not what people really think or really believe, but what they want to share, he says. Since anyone with anti-war signs is arrested immediately, protesters casually stroll along until a large enough crowd gathers to shout their opposition to what's going on in Ukraine. After the forum had ended, I made a visit to Kyiv that coincided with a Russian missile-and-drone barrage that heralded the start of Putin’s extensive campaign on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. People I met in the park wondered whether the statue had been the intended target, or whether the missile had been meant to hit a nearby government installation, and been downed by an air-defense missile? The hits on two symbols of Ukrainian sovereignty struck many as not coincidental. Trended data can also be very informative about the direction of changes in public opinion even if the magnitude is exaggerated. They are still trying to track Russian public opinion on key topics, including the war in Ukraine, providing a rare window into how the Russian public views the war’s dramatic turns over the last 18 months. Not surprisingly, the major shift in opinion took place after 2014. Putin’s authoritarian and great power nationalistic regime fanned ethnic Russian nationalism, turning Russians against both the Ukraine state and Ukrainians as a people. Meanwhile, Putin’s repeated claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” left no room for a Ukrainian identity other than that of “little Russians” in his Eurasian Union. Putin’s total control of the Russian media mobilized anti-Ukrainian hysteria among Russians in the decade leading up to the Kremlin’s 2014 aggression. Plus, I can see that despite many years of huge protests, the people have not achieved anything at all. While the Channel has long been the country’s greatest defence, it makes it hard to import in times of war. The course of the conflict in 2023 marked the fact that industrial-age warfare had returned too. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has sharply constricted the space for free expression in recent years, but some independent pollsters who fled the country have not abandoned their work. You will not silence us, Meduza said in a defiant statement. We need independent media to stop the war and then try and improve life in Russia at least to a degree. There is more variety of opinion in the press, but it still largely sticks to the Kremlin line. A stalwart of independent reporting for almost 29 years, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, suspended operations on 28 March after receiving warnings from Russia's media watchdog Roskomnadzor. For months, Russians of all political stripes tuned out American warnings that their country could soon invade Ukraine, dismissing them as an outlandish concoction in the West’s disinformation war with the Kremlin. But this week, after several television appearances by Mr. Putin stunned and scared some longtime observers, that sense of casual disregard turned to a deep unease. It could be their Soviet past, or the government propaganda that has been poured out for so many years, or just that there is too much fear and anxiety to actually allow the thought that the world is different from what they expect. Being far away from them helps because we try to prioritise keeping our relationship intact and caring for each other more than anything. Sometimes https://euronewstop.co.uk/why-is-russia-invading-ukraine-newsround.html can’t help but try to convince them, which obviously doesn’t work. For the record, they don’t support the war in general, they do want it to stop; however, they can justify it in their heads somehow. I deleted some of my messages because the police check social media chats on public transportation. In addition, the police recently searched the flat of a close friend of mine and then put her under house arrest for two months.
https://euronewstop.co.uk/why-is-russia-invading-ukraine-newsround.html
