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“Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine?” by Keith Gessen
January 21, 2025

In his essay “Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine?” Keith Gessen writes about the challenges researchers face when gauging Russians’s support for the war in Ukraine (The New Yorker, Jan. 10, 2025).”Since the beginning of the war, there have been fierce debates among Russian scholars, and Russians themselves, over the nature and extent of support for it.” One point of contention has been the polling data The interviews from P.S. Lab tell a more nuanced  story:

People were shocked by the war, incredulous, and grieving. “I heard somewhere that it was going to happen on February 16th,” one woman, a forty-year-old project manager, told her interviewer. “But everyone thought it was a joke, that it wouldn’t really happen, that it was American propaganda.” “It’s just surreal,” another woman, a thirty-year-old marketing analyst, said. “It shouldn’t be this way. The international community needs to find a compromise solution as soon as possible.” Masha was relieved. These were the Russians that she knew: deeply concerned with morality and ethics, but, at the same time, estranged from politics.

 

 

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