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 genuine Putin supporters. Experts on Russia describe that the pro-putin supporters are at least as large a group as the anti-putin group (similar to the trump situation in the US), but both are dwarfed by the quiet de-politicized middle. Russian politics are heavily aimed at keeping the middle from engaging.
AFAIK the attitude of the Russian middle class is like “we don’t care about politics and even if we did, there’s nothing we could do about it anyway, so we’ll just go with the flow and fly under the radar as good as we can.”
This mindset has been formed by the Soviet times and is now becoming more important again.