A new Levada Center survey shows that the percentage of Russians who think the country is on the right track has risen since the start of Putin’s war in Ukraine (from 50% to 68%), while the share who think otherwise has fallen from...
A month ago, Olha Rudenko, editor of The Kyiv Independent, posted on Facebook a comment about an unfortunate characteristic of roundtables held in the West about Ukraine. These meetings almost invariably invite “good”...
Today what is happening in Ukraine is for most Russians “’a special operation on television,’” VTsIOM director Valery Fedorov says. And that explains why Vladimir Putin has said that “we haven’t...
Despite the warnings of some commentators and the expectations of others, all polls conducted since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, both those controlled by the Kremlin and those which are independent, show Vladimir Putin’s standing...
One of the most dangerous trends in Russia today is the increasingly casual approach many people there have about the possible use of nuclear weapons in ever more places, something that goes far beyond commentators and officials who...
The passive aggressive nature of a significant portion of Russian society is the reason that the country has become increasingly Soviet again, Alina Vitukhnovskaya says. The dictatorship is not primarily to blame; instead, the country is...
In an interview with Vienna’s Die Presse, the Russian sociologist and pollster says that initially it appeared young Russians were focused on democratic models but it turned out that their attachment to them was superficial and soon...
Such views were more widely held among older Russians and less widely among younger ones, but, according to the polling agency, the idea that “Victory in the Great Fatherland War is a secondary or ordinary event in the history of...
Although serfdom was officially abolished in 1861, its underlying principles live on in Russian thinking and official practice, Kseniya Kirillova says, with most Russians accepting the idea, backed by the Kremlin, that someone born in...
In 2003, Leonid Kuchma published a book emphasizing that “Ukraine is Not Russia” in response to increasing Russian insistence that Russians and Ukrainians are not separate nations. Now, faced with Moscow’s continuing...
In 2014, after the first Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, soldiers who had lost limbs in battle were seen for the first time in public as they returned home. Since the full-on invasion by Russia in February 2022, the...
