Shaken at First, Many Russians Now Rally Behind Putin’s Invasion

Polls and interviews show many Russians now accept the Kremlin’s assertion that their country is under siege from the West. Opponents are leaving the country or keeping quiet.

The stream of antiwar letters to a St. Petersburg lawmaker has dried up. Some Russians who had criticized the Kremlin have turned into cheerleaders for the war. Those who publicly oppose it have found the word “traitor” scrawled on their apartment door.

Five weeks into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there are signs that the Russian public’s initial shock has given way to a mix of support for their troops and anger at the West. On television, entertainment shows have been replaced by extra helpings of propaganda, resulting in an around-the-clock barrage of falsehoods about the “Nazis” who run Ukraine and American-funded Ukrainian bioweapons laboratories.

Polls and interviews show that many Russians now accept Mr. Putin’s contention that their country is under siege from the West and had no choice but to attack.
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...polls released this week by Russia’s most respected independent pollster, Levada, showed Putin’s approval rating hitting 83 percent, up from 69 percent in January. Eighty-one percent said they supported the war, describing the need to protect Russian speakers as its primary justification.

Analysts cautioned that as the economic pain wrought by sanctions deepens in the coming months, the public mood could shift yet again. Some also argued that polls in wartime have limited significance, with many Russians fearful of voicing dissent, or even their true opinion, to a stranger at a time when new censorship laws are punishing any deviation from the Kremlin narrative with as much as 15 years in prison.

So why conduct a poll in Russia during wartime then?

But even accounting for that effect, Denis Volkov, Levada’s director, said his group’s surveys showed that many Russians had adopted the belief that a besieged Russia had to rally around its leader.

Exactly. I trust Levada to get at least a probably reliable poll result.

Particularly effective in that regard, he said, was the steady drumbeat of Western sanctions, with airspace closures, visa restrictions and the departure of popular companies like McDonald’s and Ikea feeding the Kremlin line that the West is waging an economic war on the Russian people.

That's not propaganda! We are waging economic war on the Russian people. From: BENJAMIN HARRIS to: RUSSIAN PEOPLE. Eat sawdust and die.

“The confrontation with the West has consolidated people,” Mr. Volkov said.

Good! We're consolidated, too. We're all in agreement on the good ship Consolidation.

...the Levada poll found 81 percent of Russians supporting the war...

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“While people are frowning at us everywhere outside our borders, at least for this period of time, we have to stick together,” Mikhail [an interviewee] said.
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Aleksei Venediktov, the former editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, the liberal radio station forced to shut down in early March, said he found a severed pig’s head outside his door last week and a sticker that said “Jewish pig.” On Wednesday, Lucy Stein, a member of the protest group Pussy Riot who sits on a municipal council in Moscow, found a photo of herself taped to her apartment door with a message printed on it: “Don’t sell your homeland.”

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Antiwar protests, which led to more than 15,000 arrests across the country in the first weeks of the war, have largely petered out. By some estimates, several hundred thousand Russians have fled amid outrage over the war and fear of conscription and closed borders; a trade organization said that at least 50,000 tech workers alone had left the country.
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In a phone interview, a political analyst in Moscow, 45,...

Trump's in Moscow holding a rally!