Russians don’t care about war or casualties. Even those who oppose it want to ‘finish what was started’, says sociologist
by drevny_kocur
Russians don’t care about war or casualties. Even those who oppose it want to ‘finish what was started’, says sociologist
by drevny_kocur
4 comments
> Russians are not interested in the war in Ukraine, and those who are least interested in it are those who are most affected by it, i.e. young men. These are also the conclusions of the Russian public opinion research agency Levada Centre. “For most Russians, it’s not about the territory, but about who rules Ukraine,” sociologist Alexei Levinson described in an interview with iROZHLAS.cz, adding that his compatriots have experience of protracted conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya and are therefore not as “impatient” as the West.
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> **What is ordinary life like in Moscow or St. Petersburg? A recent article in the American newspaper, the New York Times, described how the war in Ukraine is not noticeable in the Russian capital.**
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> Yes, a lot of people say that. I think the same. You would have to be very observant to see signs of anything abnormal. The superficial impression is that everything is normal, even more joyful in the center of Moscow. There are a lot of tourists from other parts of Russia, maybe even more than before because they can’t travel abroad.
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> **But in recent weeks, several Ukrainian drones have flown as far as Moscow, for example, crashing into skyscrapers in the Moscow City district. How do the locals see it? Aren’t they afraid that the war is getting closer?**
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> No, they don’t care because the only damage is to the windows of the skyscrapers, and those are not of high symbolic value, not the Kremlin or some of the major churches.
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> Even the drones that hit the Kremlin a few months ago had no impact on the Russian public. Because they don’t cause any major damage, they don’t address that. Maybe if they hit something very important, that would change.
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> I can’t judge, but some observers say that these drone strikes are more important to the Ukrainian public than to the Russian public, and they may be right.
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> **We spoke exactly a year ago. What has changed in Russia or Russian society in 12 months?**
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> I think war has become routine, as have the sacrifices involved. Perhaps the important news is the money promised to those who sign a contract with the army and enlist.
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> The amount used to be around the normal salary, now it is several times higher. So is the money a soldier’s family gets if he is injured or killed.
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> The money a soldier sends home to his family is enough to buy a new home or move from a small town to a larger one or pay for college. This is not information from our surveys, but our economics experts say that this money is already moving the Russian economy in the wrong direction, they see it in the numbers.
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> A very important part of this is that a lot of poor people have borrowed from the bank or even from non-banking companies that offer quick money at very high interest.
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> Economists say many poor Russians have large debts and no hope of paying them back, which would be a big problem for these families. The money they get (from the army) is enough to pay them off.
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> ## Rock-solid support
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> **In your agency, you recently conducted an opinion poll to find out how much Russians care about what is happening around Ukraine. What did you get?**
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> The picture is clear. The older people are, the more interested they are in the war in Ukraine and the more they support it, as well as Putin.
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> On the contrary, young men who are subject to conscription answer that they are not interested in the conflict in Ukraine. I think that this is a symbolic way of distancing themselves from everything that concerns the war, the army and conscription.
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> **Do you think that young Russians are pretending to be uninterested in the war, when in fact they are not?**
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> Yes, but I can’t prove it. Or maybe conscription is a problem for many of them, but war is not.
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> > **Alexei Levinson**
> >
> > Alexei Levinson is a Russian sociologist, and has been researching public opinion since the 1970s. He has worked at the Levada Center since its founding in 2003, and was a close associate of its founder, Yuri Levada. He currently heads the department of socio-cultural research. He has also worked at the Moscow School of Economics.
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> **Eighteen months after the start of the invasion, according to your surveys, the Russian army enjoys great support. How is this possible when, except perhaps for the capture of Bakhmut, it has not recorded any significant victories?**
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> Frankly, neither I nor my colleagues have a simple explanation for what the Russians think or what they are telling us about this war, because the numbers do not change.
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> The numbers of support for Putin as president are rock solid. We’ll see in a week what the results are for August, but it was 82 percent in July, the same as in March 2022, and nothing can affect that, only at the time of mobilization (September 2022) the drop was seven points, no more, still his support was extremely high.
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> As for “support for the Russian military’s actions”, which is what we asked about in the poll, those numbers don’t change depending on information about victories or losses. Such information is very strictly filtered by the Russian media, but even so, people understand that the war has frozen.
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> But this is not news or a surprise to the Russians, because they have experience of the war in Afghanistan, which lasted a decade, or the war in Chechnya, which also lasted almost a decade.
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> They think that war is something that happens somewhere far away, with no results, and this is a war of the same model. It is happening somewhere else and there are no successes or defeats. It’s okay for them to do it that way.
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> **Public expectations in the West are very different. Americans or Europeans are always wondering when the Ukrainians will do “something big”, when they will achieve significant victories, when we will see the results of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.**
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> Yes, this is true. Since 2008, the Russian public has taken a position directly opposite to that of the Europeans or the rest of the world. At that time, there was a brief war with Georgia when the Russians invaded and cut off two regions. NATO, the European Union and others were very critical of this, but the Russians did not care.
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> This was repeated in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. The Russians were happy, others were angry, the Russians did not care and still do not care. It is not news to us that our positions are contradictory.
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> **Why don’t the Russians care?**
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> I don’t have an answer to why they don’t care, but I do have an answer to how. The crux of the matter is that the West is the enemy of the Russians. In the minds of Russians there is this simple equation: if your opponent says something critical about you, it means you are right. It is very simple and very powerful.
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> ## The grey zone of influence
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> **How does the Russian leadership explain to the public why it is at war in Ukraine? In the beginning, Putin talked about “de-Nazification”, but no one can hear that today.**
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> I don’t follow official statements, but I know how they reflect in the public mindset. The most important development of the last few months has been that the public has invented its own explanation, and that is “If it has started, it should be finished”.
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> I think that’s an extremely important development because it’s much stronger as an explanation or justification for the war compared to the ideological ideas of fighting Nazism or fascism or that NATO and the US are behind it.
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> All these narratives are still present in people’s minds, but this justification is acceptable even to those who think that this war is a bad political decision or that it is unjust. It’s, “Let’s put aside the questions of why and for what, who started it and whose fault it is, all this is not important, we have to finish it.”
Does it even matter what Russians want?
There was another poll a year ago or so that showed Russians would be happy if the Tsar decided to end the war and that they would be equally happy if the Tsar ordered to continue the war.
They’re just happy to have the guy who makes decisions for them.
I mean, I don’t think just Russians are guilty of this..
Sounds familiar.