This report is insightful on Putin and the Russian people.
After months of tuning out American warnings that Vladimir Putin was preparing to invade Ukraine, Russians now realize that “this is not a game.”
MOSCOW —...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 that all but threatened Ukraine with war.
...
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. ...several television appearances by Mr.
Putin stunned and scared some longtime observers...
...
The gathering specter of war is a different matter altogether, though; in recent days, Russia has not seen any of the jubilation that accompanied the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Going to war is one of Russians’ greatest fears, according to the Levada Center, an independent pollster. And after Mr. Putin’s angry speech and his cryptic televised meeting with his Security Council on Monday, that possibility lurched closer toward becoming reality.
“This hatred that you could read in him so clearly, it wasn’t fake,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former adviser to Mr. Putin, who acknowledged that this week’s events had forced him to revise his skepticism that the president would go to war against Ukraine. “This is not a game.”
Something has changed in Putin for Russians to read "hatred" in him "so clearly", to be "stunned and scared." I have been curious to watch Putin's speech for myself but I haven't searched for it. I thought that one of the Times articles since Monday would link to it. They did not.
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, the sudden threat of war and of another downward spiral in relations with the West feel like the imminent loss of much of the freedom and opportunity that remains in Russia.
...Monday’s Security Council meeting at which Mr. Putin at times browbeat and humiliated his most powerful and senior officials into telling him that he should recognize the separatist territories. The central message of this extraordinary spectacle of fealty, which the Kremlin taped, edited and aired on television, appeared to be that it was Mr. Putin alone who had the power to chart Russia’s course.
WOW.
...
This Sunday will mark the seventh anniversary of the murder in Moscow of the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, one of the loudest voices inside Russia opposing the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Putin, like Rasputin, is a numerologist.
The opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny warned that Russia was about to “squander the historical chance for a normal rich life for the sake of war, dirt, lies” and Mr. Putin’s personal luxury — but Mr. Navalny was writing from prison, where he now faces an additional 15-year term.
Some in the Russian public are starting to speak out. In St. Petersburg on Wednesday, one activist stood on a busy sidewalk holding up a copy of Russia’s most famous antiwar painting, “The Apotheosis of War” by Vasily Vereshchagin. ...
"One." That's pathetic.
An online magazine, Kholod, started a social media campaign called “I’m not silent” that encouraged readers to post about why they opposed war.
“It has become impossible to ignore what has been happening in recent days,” the magazine’s editor, Taisia Bekbulatova, wrote on Facebook on Monday. “Many people say that they wake up every day with the thought that war might have broken out. This is some kind of madness.”
It may be! Putin may have cracked....one of Russia’s most popular YouTubers, the journalist Yuri Dud, posted a photograph of Mr. Putin’s Security Council meeting on Instagram on Tuesday and quoted a Russian musician saying he experienced “endless feelings of shame and guilt” over what his country had done to Ukraine.
“I grew up in Russia and Russia is my homeland,” Mr. Dud wrote. “But I wish maximum support in these days to Ukraine — the homeland of my relatives and the home of my friends.”
