+1. another example, Ceucescu official approval was in the high 90s on the eve of his overthrow too, which started as he was speaking to a large rallly
Ah, yes, need to unskew those polls.
I don’t claim to know what the situation actually is in Russia but according to public surveys going back years, Putin’s public approval went up with the start of the war. And it’s taken a dip since the mobilization but still higher than pre war levels.
Lololol
Can really rely on that wartime Russian media and polls in a country where holding a random sign gets you arrested
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quick, name 5 differences between 2014 crimea (or 2008 georgia, or second chechen war) and 2022 ukraine.
5. it is currently illegal to disseminate information “disparaging the russian army”. war isn’t declared though. not even “war time”
4. it is currently illegal to protest with an empty sign while standing alone
3. it is currently illegal to donate to journalists who have been marked as “foreign agents”
2. it is currently illegal to relocate within russia (!) as in leave the oblast’ where you live, because army needs to find you for mobilization.
1. there are currently 50k+ dead russian servicemen, and thousands of destroyed russian armor in ukraine. also tens of thousands of wounded.
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Ok? So you’re saying that there’s a huge mass of discontent not being measured? Maybe. I’ve never been to Russia and have no way of knowing if that’s true or not. But everything I’ve read in western media suggests the war is popular.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/07/russia-war-ukraine-public-opinion/
A couple weeks ago, Twitter was giddy at Ukraine’s counterattack on Russian forces to retake land that had been occupied while driving Russian troops out of the country. The end of the war and defeat of the Russians seemed to be a mere formality at that point.
Today, Putin announces annexation of a large swatch of occupied Ukraine.
Can someone give me cliffs on what the hell is actually going on?
Putin is responding to battlefield losses by doubling down. The annexation is meant to shore up domestic support.
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maybe you should be required to put this disclaimer at the top of every post in this thread. just a thought
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I don’t think the bold was the consensus - nor was it right. Ukraine did make some solid gains, but they mostly took areas where Russia did not put up much resistance (although this was in part because Ukraine had been weakening those positions). It was always going to be a long slog to retake the rest of Ukraine.
It seems since the big counteroffensive, Ukraine is still making some gains, but mostly pretty small and Russia is still pushing in some areas as well.
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Start an RFC
i am not trying to run this site. i’ll just pummel your garbage arguments into the ground for the nonsense that they are.
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Great, start with that Washington Post article I posted and the Carnegie Endowment study it was based on. Their conclusion: the war is pretty popular in Russia. Get to pummeling that garbage conclusion into the ground!
wapo and the study it cited only uses the official numbers from ВЦИОМ and Levada, which are garbage polls to begin with. and they never address how tiny the respondents rate is.
Opinion polls consistently show that the majority of respondents support the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine.
done!
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Can you point me in the direction of a reputable poll measuring war support in Russia?
Response rates for polls everywhere have plummeted over the decades. They’re quite low in the US, in part leading to the Great Unskewing Pollz movement.
The response rate in the Russian polls in question didn’t change before and after the war started.
ukraine is still playing a very cautious counteroffensive game. perhaps too cautious for our appetite, but noone can question Zaluzhnyj. dude is going to come out looking like Eisenhower.
basically, they are less concerned about quickly taking back territory, and would rather focus on controlling the russian ability to fight, which is still very high and mobiks already appearing at the front. this is roughly what happened in Kharkiv. the ukrainian offensive employed smaller numbers of soldiers than russia had garrisoned in the region, and the objective was cutting supply routes. but they ended up capturing more territory than they thought possible in the same time, because the second and third line of russian defense “collapsed” and exposed the russian army hq post to artillery. once command folded, the units retreated in haste.
IMHO, AFU wants to stem the flow of new equipment and ammo into donbass first, and then force the ru lines of defense to collapse/retreat like in kharkiv. this would recapture territory with fewer casualties to both sides.
most independent organizations doing polling in russia were outlawed since about 2020. since 2020, the rest were labeled extremist, foreign agents, and were forced into jail or exile.
So what are you basing your statements that the war is not popular in Russia on?
have you been following the protests against mobilization? or the people fleeing on foot to neighboring countries?