President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman informed Russians this week that the “special military operation” that Putin launched in Ukraine in February 2022 was set to go on much longer because it is now “a war against the collective West.”
That’s right: a war.
It was remarkable to hear that word from Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Journalists were explicitly banned from using it as the invasion began and thousands of Russians have been detained, fined and imprisoned for telling the truth about a war which has now been raging for almost two years.
“Moscow deputy Aleksey Gorinov was sentenced to seven years in prison for saying ‘war,’” Sergey Davidis, head of the Political Prisoners Support group, told The Daily Beast. He said over 20,000 Russians have now been detained and punished for protesting against the war. “That includes 131 Russians who have been sentenced to long prison terms in punishment for peaceful or for more radical anti-war actions,” he said. “I don’t think punishments against the war will now be milder after the Kremlin openly says ‘war.’ Putin will be next to declare it.”
There are a lot of people there that haven’t experienced oppression personally and genuinely believe that “strong ruler” that “keeps people in line” is what’s needed for their country to be “strong”.
Also one of the key points of Russian propaganda that has been hammered into them for decades is that “democracy is a sham” and that any alternative to Putin’s regime would be just as oppressive and simply less “competent” (and therefore lead to Russia’s ruin).
Putin supporters do not believe that democracy can work and they don’t want democracy, as simple as that.
There’s a reason why Russians do not believe democracy can work. It is the fact that the only brief time there was democracy in Russia in the past few hundred years was a time of unmitigated chaos. The transition away from communism was un utter disaster. The west didn’t help either. All the west did was try take a piece of the pie.