NYT: Many Russians Feel a Deep Unease Over Going to War

[BeyondGeography]

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. Putin’s aggrieved speech to the nation on Monday that all but threatened Ukraine with war.

“Things are going to be very, very uncertain,” she said, “and, most likely, very sad.”

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.

Early Thursday morning, any remaining skepticism that their country would invade was put to rest, when Mr. Putin declared a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

….many Russians still subscribe to the Kremlin narrative of a Russia forced to fight back against Western powers determined to destroy it. Mr. Putin’s speech, for all its emotion, was in tune with the grievances of many older Russians still smarting from the poverty that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the lost prestige that accompanied it.

But for others, especially younger people, a war and the possibility of another downward spiral in relations with the West could mean losing what freedom and opportunity they feel remains in Russia.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-putin.html

[JudyM]

1. K&R

Hoping for some kind of reckoning.

[Wingus Dingus]

2. Do they? That's nice.

From what I've read of the "citizen on the street" interviews, they're 100 percent concerned about themselves. No moral quandary, no concern for ordinary Ukrainians, no "this is not who we are" protests, no wrestling with conscience. Just "boy I hope things don't suck more here for me".