81% of Russians Support the War

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/world/europe/russia-putin-support-ukraine.html

by holografix • 4 years ago

13 22 4 years ago

NoPie2• 4 years ago

It is true but it is so unbelievable and surreal. How can it be? I have friends in Russia and now I read their posts on vk.com and so many of them are pro-war completely believe Putin's narrative. It is so sad.

dane-pgp2• 4 years ago

Maintaining a separate view of reality from everyone else around you is cognitively expensive, even if your view is the one that agrees with the facts, and even if you don't have to worry about being shunned by your peers or disappeared by the powerful.

Sadly, human brains are very good at coming up with justifications for what they want to believe, and people probably find that loudly embracing the false narratives is an effective way to drown out their cognitive dissonance.

hindsightbias• 4 years ago

73% of Americans saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as morally justified

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx

And they had a access to every narrative. Kudos to that Russian 19% with no alternatives.

vegai_• 4 years ago

Kudos to that Russian 19% with no alternatives.

Probably a good portion of those 19% have ways to browse western media.

downrightmike2• 4 years ago

Hope they're also good with paying Ukraine war reparations for the next few generations too.

drekk• 4 years ago

Do you support the US paying reparations? UK? France? Belgium?

Just curious, asking for hundreds of millions of civilian casualties. I support Russia paying reparations to Ukraine if we're going to be consistent about it when the victims are, for example, Yemeni

sidibe• 4 years ago

Yup, one of the nice things about todays internet with stuff like Translate and Google Lens is you can go and see for yourself. I thought Pikabu.ru was a relatively liberal social media site and now they've all rallied around the flag and subscribe to and spout out all of Putin's talking points and even now move Kadyrov

HarryHirsch• 4 years ago

One wonders: how many Americans would have supported a shooting war in Cuba, had it come to it in 1962.

dane-pgp2• 4 years ago

The Cuba situation was perhaps a little more complicated because the US implemented a naval blockade of the island (disingenuously labelled a "quarantine"), which, to many, didn't look like an act of war.

Therefore if the Soviets had tried to exercise their sovereign right to dock their ships at a Cuban port, and the US navy had opened fire, then there might have been uncertainty about whether the Soviet breaching of the blockade was an act of aggression that the US was merely defending itself against.

No such ambiguity exists in Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, despite their label of "special military operation". Their covert invasion (and effective military occupation) of Crimea and the separatist regions are better examples of ambiguous acts of war, though.

zardo• 4 years ago

They'd probably have been mostly concerned with how to avoid radiation poisoning, and which of their friends and family survived the nuclear exchange.

NoPie2• 4 years ago

How many Cubans would have supported it today?

Cubans today are totally unhappy with their socialistic government. They would have definitely be better off if their government had fallen. On the other hand, democracy cannot be established by weapons. People need to desire it themselves first.

akhmatova5• 4 years ago

A similar percentage or higher, given the climate at the time.

wrp2• 4 years ago

If you are interested in trying to understand the Russian perspective, I'd suggest the stuff from Richard Sakwa, like his book Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands.[1] Sakwa is a Russia specialist and seems to have put more effort that anyone else into understanding how Russians view the Ukraine situation. Pro-Ukrainian writers have accused him of being an apologist for Russia, but I think it's more accurate to say that he tries to be objectively critical and so doesn't support popular narratives.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/24717077-frontline-uk...

akhmatova5• 4 years ago

Pro-Ukrainian writers have accused him of being an apologist for Russia

There is a certain slipperiness to Sakwa's language that makes it clear where is his sympathies rest -- and that he is not merely reporting "how the average Russian citizen sees it". For example, the title he chose for this opinion piece, put out just a few weeks before the orchestrated murder campaign that some are calling a "war":

    Whisper it, but Putin has a point in Ukraine

as buttressed by the nauseating content of that piece are precisely what brigs the "apologist" description, applied to Sakwa, into sharp focus.

wrp2• 4 years ago

Here is that January 25 piece with its "nauseating content."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/whisper-it-but-putin-has...

Also, here is a more detailed piece from March 10.

https://prruk.org/the-march-of-folly-resumed-russia-ukraine-...

amai• 4 years ago

It is illegal in Russia to be against the war. So what outcome do you expect from the polls?

akhmatova5• 4 years ago

The only slightly lower numbers for support within the country (73 percent) for the U.S.'s (none too dissimilar) invasion of Iraq in 2003 (as posted by another commenter) are actually quite important, for context.

Given that the NYT was perhaps the most notable of journalistic cheerleaders for that debacle -- a shameful episode in its history that it now "regrets" -- their failure to mention this context should not be surprising.

81% of Russians Support the War

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