The economy hasn’t been stable for a long time and the sanctions haven’t gone away. Travel is hard – you can’t go anywhere with a Russian passport. Many Western brands leaving Russia have paved the way for young entrepreneurs and new, high-quality Russian brands are thriving. At the same time, there have been cases of pro-war pupils recording their teachers making dovish statements in class, and reporting them to the authorities. Hungary previously said it would block further financial aid to Ukraine, but this morning suggested it was ready to compromise after the EU reportedly drew up plans to hit Budapest's economy. The Levada Center stays within those parameters by asking whether people support the actions of the Russian military. For many Ukrainians, especially in the south and eastern regions of the country, Russian is the first language. St Petersburg, Russia – On Thursday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his armed forces were launching a massive operation against Ukraine, sending frightened Kyiv residents into underground stations for shelter. I haven’t lived with my parents for many years, but even if I did, I wouldn’t argue with them, because it’s their business what to think. The war has stirred up some opposition and anti-Putin sentiment, but it has been confined to a minority who are unlikely to change Putin’s mind, let alone topple him. This plan fell apart within the first 48 hours of the war when early operations like an airborne assault on the Hostomel airport ended in disaster, forcing Russian generals to develop a new strategy on the fly. What they came up with — massive artillery bombardments and attempts to encircle and besiege Ukraine’s major cities — was more effective (and more brutal). The Russians made some inroads into Ukrainian territory, especially in the south, where they have laid siege to Mariupol and taken Kherson and Melitopol. What do Russians think of the war in Ukraine? Right now though, Russian people are not free to express their opinions anyway, with a new law in place making it a criminal offence to say anything about the Ukraine conflict which the authorities consider untrue. Jenny Hill is in Moscow, and has been keeping her ear to the ground. Yet Volkov added that this tolerance, however passive, is likely to remain quite stable, even strong. “If I watched different channels, I would probably have a different opinion, but I don’t watch them,” she said. 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. “It’s not about having to reconsider this one event but everything you thought and understood over the last ten or fifteen years,” Volkov told me. But it is difficult to determine how reliable these surveys are, in light of new crackdowns on free speech and dissent in Russia, where even the use of the word “war” to describe the invasion is now a crime. In the meantime, sanctions affect every Russian citizen in their daily lives – both those who support and those who oppose the war, those at home and those abroad. It involves a military assault with air, sea and land forces being deployed in combination with sophisticated cyber attacks and relentless propaganda disseminated by conventional as well as social media. What do Russians make of their country’s invasion of Ukraine? It is no easy matter to conduct opinion polls in Russia at the best of times, sampling views from St Petersburg to Siberia. A year on, what do young Russians think of the war in Ukraine? He says officials are instead monitoring the situation to make sure that it's under control. But when things opened up in the 1990s, he says, his field exploded. During that time, lots of data became available from the Russian permafrost regions, he remembers. International scientists started collaborating with Russian scientists to investigate how permafrost was changing. In the past – like, Soviet Union past – the data from this part of the world was also limited, says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who trained in Moscow. In the mid-1970s, young scientists had virtually no contact with western collaborators, he remembers. For that, I was named ‘Volunteer of the Year’ in my hometown of Odintsovo. On Thursday morning, Putin said he had authorised military action to defend itself against what he said were threats emanating from Ukraine. But I don’t feel safe expressing my opinion, especially when I talk about it online or on the phone. 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. MOSCOW — Waiting for her friends on Moscow’s primly landscaped Boulevard Ring earlier this week, Svetlana Kozakova admitted that she’d had a sleepless night. She kept checking the news on her phone after President Vladimir V. https://euronewstop.co.uk/how-many-troops-does-ukraine-have.html s aggrieved speech to the nation on Monday that all but threatened Ukraine with war. The resolution of these issues will likely depend quite a bit on the war’s progress. Elsewhere on the BBC Koneva said public opinion in Russia increasingly seems resigned to a longer-term war. Koneva said researchers found that people in this group, the largest single segment of the population, have contradictory attitudes toward the war, consisting of narratives from both sides of the conflict. If researchers exclude this group and also exclude the 20% of Russians who admit they oppose the war, that leaves about half of the country's population who researchers say support the war only at the declarative level. Sixteen months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the majority of respondents still support the war, and only 20% say they are against. One pattern identified by pollsters is that most Russians say they would support peace talks to end the fighting. But what kind of guarantees they would give independent Ukraine is not yet clear. 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. Here’s where Ukraine has mounted multiple attacks this week in the apparent beginning of its long-planned counteroffensive. But many in Russia would be taken by surprise if war was to start soon. In Russia, state-run newspapers and media outlets blame the West for aggression, mirroring the Kremlin's language. In late 2013, Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the authoritarian and pro-Russian tilt of incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych, forcing his resignation on February 22, 2014. Hungary has been a thorn in the EU's side when it comes to decisions of providing aid for Ukraine, and it now appears the tussle between the two sides could escalate. The night ends with a 39-year-old man driving a car into the police barriers at Pushkin Square with signs “This is war! The vast majority of Ukrainians until recently had a positive image of Russia, but a growing number now have a critical or skeptical attitude to Russia. 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. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg condemned Russia’s “reckless and unprovoked attack” and said NATO allies would meet to tackle the consequences. Russian-backed separatists in the east said they had captured two towns, the RIA news agency reported. Russia has demanded an end to NATO’s eastward expansion and said Ukrainian membership of the US-led Atlantic military alliance was unacceptable. Weeks of intense diplomacy and the imposition of Western sanctions on Russia failed to deter Putin, who had massed between 150,000 and 200,000 troops along the borders of Ukraine. Romanovsky is also concerned about young Russian scientists who are important to the future of climate research in the region. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said he will block the use of the EU budget to provide €50bn in financial aid to Ukraine. Hungary has been a thorn in the EU's side when it comes to decisions of providing aid for Ukraine, and it now appears the tussle between the two sides could escalate. A confidential plan drawn up by Brussels reportedly suggests the EU will go for Hungary's economy if Budapest blocks further aid for Ukraine this week. It follows a series of similar drone raids on Russian energy infrastructure in recent weeks, some of which have disrupted fuel production. The attack on the Slavneft-YANOS refinery caused no fire or casualties, governor Mikhail Yevrayev said. However, Mr Orban's political director said this morning that Hungary was open to using the EU budget to allow further aid for Ukraine. The day before the start of the war, Putin told the nation of WWII-era promises not to expand NATO eastward and said those promises had been broken five times. Ukraine's flirtation with NATO membership pushed those fears into overdrive. The somewhat more comforting and nuanced answer is that the absolute risk remains relatively low so long as there is no direct NATO involvement in the conflict, which the Biden administration has repeatedly ruled out. Though Biden said “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power” in a late March speech, both White House officials and the president himself stressed afterward that the US policy was not regime change in Moscow. Most other countries around the world fall somewhere on the spectrum between the West and China. Outside of Europe, only a handful of mostly pro-American states — like South Korea, Japan, and Australia — have joined the sanctions regime.
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