A poll door-to-door carried out in Russia a month ago, with a very representative sociological sample, has confirmed that the popularity of President Vladimir Putin is at its highest point.
The research was carried out by the study center levada, with a representative sample of 1,600 people from all the towns and cities of the country. The country has a law passed in early March that punishes anyone who discredits the work of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine with up to 15 years in prison.
According to the poll, despite or as a result of the lawapproval of Putin’s handling of the armed conflict has soared from 63% November 2021, when negotiations with NATO began and the military deployment around Ukraine, rose to 71% in February, and to 83% in March of this year, since the conflict had already begun a month earlier.
Moreover, if the Duma elections were held this week, 39% of those surveyed said they would vote for United Russia, leaving the communist party as second with 11% voting intention.
In the program Baseof Público, several analysts have counted as since Putin came to power, the private sector has increased its presence in the country to 60%making it clear through expropriations and nationalizations that no oligarch of the Yeltsin era could get out of the ‘path’ of Vladimir Putin, capitalism yes, but under his orders.
questions about the war
The Russians do not want war as such, and consider this situation as others experienced in the past. “It is not a war, it is an imposition of peace,” says the study center on the conflict with Georgia in 2008. “The Russians do not consider the development of events on the border with Ukraine a war.”
This nuance of words is also reflected in what political analyst Anton Barbashin, director of Riddle, “The media follows a line to refer to the people we fight. They use other words: Nazis, far-rightists, terrorists… They don’t call them Ukrainian forces or the Army of Ukraine. They try to show a nation kidnapped by the kyiv Junta, which is supported by the West. And the Russians, especially the older ones, try to think of themselves as two different entities: the Ukrainians, who are there and different from the Russians, and the people we are fighting against, put in by the US or indoctrinated by the West.”
What the population thinks
The ordinary population is the one that is experiencing the pressure from family and friends, especially if there are relatives who live in Russia and other countries who urge them to criticize what they see, the massacres, the mass graves, the civil destruction, the flight of minors and mothers, but the answer is not always easy.
A Russian citizen has told The country “It’s not that people want people to die, but that they understand and believe the government when it says there was a threat.” And the local media does not teach them anything else, besides that any access to the internet outside of Russia is banned, trips cancelled, and the information that reaches them, even if it is from direct relatives in Ukraine, is not credible because they do not see it in their television. Critical media outlets were censored and removed from platforms in Russia.
The news portal OVD-Infospecialized in following the protests in Russia, affirms that 15,409 people have been arrested since February 24 for demonstrating against the war in Ukraine. in this linkThey have a list of detainees.
As for the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, the population in general, in all age groups, is in favor. 86% of those over 55 years of age support the military campaign, the same as 71% of young people between 18 and 24 years of age.
In another attempt to survey the Russian invasionMaksim Katz, politician of the Yabloko party, environmentalist, humanist, and who barely has a representation in the Duma, said that they had commissioned a survey on the conflict “and of 31,000 calls, in 29,400 they hung up on us.” The politician compared the war in Ukraine with the war in vietnam with the perception and attitude of the American population as the war progressed. Of maximum support at the beginning, to contempt even for the soldiers who returned home wounded or who had completed their mission.