Elise Giuliano (Political Science) was interviewed on the World about new research on Russia’s extremely high casualty count in the war conducted by the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona.
“The situation that we really have to understand about Russia is that Putin and the government has worked hard to demobilize the population to kind of get them to a place where like they just don’t care about politics, they consider it dirty business, they consider it something outside that doesn’t affect their life,” she said.
Giuliano also points out that many of the troops dying in Ukraine come from underprivileged sectors of Russian society.
“There’s a willingness to look away from what’s going on, to not caring and not understanding the depth of the problem, and the number of people dying,” she said. “Feeding into that lack of concern unfortunately on the part of a lot of ordinary Russians would be, well it’s the prisoners dying, it’s the poor, rural people dying and it’s the ethnic minorities dying.”
