The ‘Road Home’ platform — Put Domói, in Russian — now has over 30,000 followers They are a minority, largely out of fear, but a growing group of women are calling for measures to bring their relatives home from the front They are expressing their discomfort on the channel, have addressed deputies and held protests Beginning in spring 2014, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia begin to massively change—not because of any state-directed propaganda campaigns but in response to Putin’s military aggression
Standing at one queue in Moscow, Evgeny name changed, 45, said he wanted to withdraw money to pay off his mortgage "When the operation in Donbas started I went to the ATM and withdrew the savings I had in Sberbank in dollars Now I literally keep them under my pillow At the start of 2022 one dollar traded for about 75 roubles and a euro for 80
Honor the memory of our boys or laying flowers for “never again,” the group said last weekend “At first no one wanted to bring our subject to light; it seemed like a secret under lock and key If we wrote to some governor when he spoke on a live program, he answered the most banal questions and ignored the hundreds of messages about the return of the mobilized,” she recalls As for me, personally, I lost the opportunity to move into my own apartment, which I was supposed to do soon because the renovations became too expensive Because of this, I will have to live for a long time in a place where I’m not very comfortable My feelings are mixed regarding the decision of our president
OK, I confess I didn't know who the woman was, but her thoughts didn't exactly seem preoccupied by a possible invasion on her country As concern grows that Russia will invade Ukraine, BBC correspondents gauge the public mood in Moscow and Kyiv on whether the crisis could lead to a wider war in Europe The educated and the wealthy, many of them urban residents, are fleeing mobilisation Those with more meagre resources are going to recruiting stations They may be frightened and apprehensive, and not very keen to fight, but they are not ready to break away from the imaginary “national body” whose will and aspirations are expressed for them by Mr Putin The fraught nature of their decisions to enlist will increase their hostility toward those who make the opposite choice
It’s too scary, the idea of dying or being locked up for life Plus, I can see that despite many years of huge protests, the people have not achieved anything at all It is difficult to get any reliable information out of Russia, but our research suggests the Kremlin’s hold on its people is perhaps not what it is made out to be In his mobilisation speech on September 21st, Mr Putin used choice rhetoric of the party of total war to persuade Russian citizens of the enemy’s proximity and the need to defend the motherland Many commentators declared that this rhetoric would undermine the fragile support of the majority for the war Mr Putin has a long record of masterfully manipulating public sentiment
After Russia took control of the Crimean Peninsula in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan revolution, rebels in eastern Ukraine held their own unofficial referendums demanding greater autonomy from Kyiv They were not recognised by Ukraine’s central government, whom Ivan blames for what happened next The term dates back to the second world war, when nationalist fighters in western Ukraine led by Stepan Bandera sided with the Nazis against the Red Army and committed war crimes against Poles and Jews “I grew up in the Soviet Union, where we were all brothers and sisters,” he said
The data reveal that while a narrow majority of Russians think their government should start peace negotiations 53 percent, returning any territory to Ukraine as concessions in a negotiation would be overwhelmingly unacceptable to the public Most of the Russian public also opposes any use of nuclear weapons by Moscow Sadly, many of these relations have been strained in recent years due to the Putin government’s hostility towards Ukraine and the Russian media’s relentless and baseless attacks on Ukrainians The situation has resulted in contacts being terminated for political reasons as a result of changing attitudes towards Russia as a whole 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 Having a prosperous, modern, independent and democratic European state bordering Russia was perceived as posing a threat to Russia’s autocratic regime