Angela Bachevskaya16:44, 29.11.23

The average Russian considers it his duty to support what the state considers right, recent polls on attitudes towards Putin and the war in Ukraine demonstrate.

Russians are increasingly tired of Vladimir Putin’s regime’s war against Ukraine , but disagree about how much harm it has caused and how to stop it. This is stated in a report prepared on the basis of surveys and focus groups of the Russian Carnegie Eurasian Center and the independent polling group Levada Center, writes The Washington Post .

Remarkably, however, with President Vladimir Putin appearing ready to contest a tame presidential election in March, Russians have not turned against him, and Western efforts to punish Russia for the war have not weakened his grip on power, the report says:

All the naive predictions that popular discontent caused by the sanctions and restrictions imposed by wartime on everyday life would lead to the fall of Vladimir Putin’s regime did not come true.”

Most Russians are convinced that Russia has paid such a high price during the war that it should not give up any of the Ukrainian territory it occupied, and Putin is determined to force Kiev to accept the land grab, a report said on Tuesday. 68% of Russians support the continuation of the war, 22% are categorically against a ceasefire under any circumstances. The same number, about 20%, strongly oppose the war, a figure that has remained unchanged since the February 2022 invasion.

The majority of Russians – 72% – support peace negotiations, but only 19% are ready to make concessions to Ukraine for the sake of peace. 1,600 people took part in the surveys cited in the report.

The most active support for the war comes from a motivated and strong-willed minority, mostly older male militarists, who tend to cite Russian propaganda about the need to “fight Ukrainian Nazis.” In the war support party, young people and women are a minority.

“Although the public is tired of the ‘special military operation’, there are different opinions about how the fighting should end. The problem is that the average Russian considers it his duty to support what the state considers moral and right. This explains the increase in support for repressive and restrictive laws,” the report said, using the Kremlin’s official euphemism for war.

As the report says:

Russian mass consciousness is stuck between two contradictory views. In focus groups, most war supporters argued that “we need to finish what we started” and “we have already lost too much to stop, only victory is enough.”

But the war’s high costs and lack of clear benefits are causing some concern: 41 percent of Russians believe the war has done more harm than good, with another 38 percent saying the opposite, the report says.

“Many people support government initiatives because they recognize the harm they cause,” the report says. While Russians express little trust in the government in everyday matters such as service delivery, they nevertheless appear to accept the Kremlin’s arguments about the need for war. “This tells us about the mechanism behind people’s decision-making: they will obey whatever the government decides.”

Earlier, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg spoke about how F-16 fighters will change the situation on the battlefield .

(C)UNIAN 2023