DOMINIC LAWSON: I’d like to think Ukraine was just Putin’s war, but it’s also the Russian people’s war
There are some truths that we find difficult to accept. For example, that exactly one year after Vladimir Putin sent the tanks to take complete control of Ukraine and behead its government, the war is still overwhelmingly supported by the Russian population.
Whether it’s massacres, torture, shooting of civilians, rape, bombing of hospitals and schools, forced relocation of children from conquered Ukrainian territory to Russia: Independent polls show that about 70 percent of Russians support our opinion that the West tends to “Putin’s war”. to name.
That’s the expression our politicians use at the highest level.
Visiting Poland a month after the invasion, President Joe Biden insisted that “our dispute is not with the Russian people,” declaring, addressing them directly, “That’s not who you are.”
Unfortunately, the Russian people have a quarrel with us; at least to the extent that the vast majority genuinely seems to believe President Putin’s pronouncement that Ukraine is the West’s agent in a plot to destroy Russia itself (and not just engaged in a struggle for its own survival as an independent nation) .
There are some truths that we find difficult to accept. For example, that exactly one year after Vladimir Putin sent the tanks to take complete control of Ukraine and behead its government, the war is still overwhelmingly supported by the Russian population.
Untrue
In a similar vein to Biden, Boris Johnson, as Prime Minister last April, delivered a video message to the Russian people, speaking partly in their own language: “Your President is accused of war crimes. But I can’t believe he’s acting on your behalf. Your President knows you would not support this war if you could see what is happening.’
This was Johnson’s only misstep in his otherwise well-considered response to the invasion.
I wrote at the time that his show was “pointless” because it “wouldn’t convince a single Russian who had supported the ‘military special operation’ to change his mind.” My conclusion was that if Russia were defeated in this imperial adventure, “the dominant internal reaction will not be regret, but redoubling [Russian] Self-pity – and guilt “of the West” that he started it”.
I’m not a great expert, but Dr. Jade McGlynn is: she lived in Russia for many years but is now in the UK as a Russia Specialist in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
Her book, War in Russia, will be out next month, and its title sums it up: This isn’t just about one man, President Putin. She writes that the idea that this is about “an evil tsar” and that when he is gone “the Russian people will happily trot along the path of progress” “has the disadvantage of not being true “.
dr McGlynn adds, “Putin doesn’t shape Russians’ views on foreign policy or Ukraine as much as he articulates them.”
As for the propaganda pouring out of the official TV channels (all independent media were broadcast), she notes: “The Kremlin’s selling tactics are persistent, but many Russians are in the market to buy. . . The Russian people are largely complicit in the war and the way it was waged.”
It is tempting for some to portray this as a form of mass ignorance, a consequence of Putin’s strong support among what in earlier centuries would have been disparagingly referred to as “the peasantry”. But even that would be a mistake.
Visiting Poland a month after the invasion, President Joe Biden insisted that “our dispute is not with the Russian people,” declaring, addressing them directly, “That’s not who you are.”
Owen Matthews, Russian on his mother’s side and longtime correspondent in Moscow, wrote a bitterly sad article after leaving the country last year, revealing how many worldly Russian friends of his were as committed to the seemingly necessary carnage of the Ukrainians as of any militaristic caveman: “The crisis is a great revealer of the true nature of human beings. And as it turns out, all sorts of surprising old Russian friends — people I had found bohemian, charming, intellectual, and well-informed — have proven to be obnoxious apologists.”
I’ve seen this in my own life from a much greater distance. A relative who is married to a Russian and lived there for many years told me how staggering it was to see that few saw Ukrainians as anything other than upstarts from the wrong country or vicious agents of a foreign power. He, his wife and children are in Europe now.
Owen Matthews, a Russian on his mother’s side and a longtime correspondent in Moscow, wrote a bitterly sad article after leaving the country last year
appetite
It’s true that around three-quarters of a million Russians have fled, but that doesn’t mean they’re all ashamed of what their country is doing. For a significant number of them, fear of conscription was the reason for fleeing, not disgust at the actions of their own government.
Looking at the footage being broadcast on the official television channels, it is clear that the authorities believe there is a large public appetite for the worst treatment of unruly Ukrainians – an appetite they are happy to satiate.
For example, the program director of the Russian-language version of RT (formerly Russia Today), Anton Krasovsky, said in a program last October that the treatment of Ukrainian children who complained about the Russian occupation was “to drown children like that “. . . . They should be thrown into a river with a strong current [or] just stuff them in a spruce house and burn it. Krasovsky was initially defended by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who described him as a “fantastic talented” commentator on “obvious and truthful information”; He was later briefly suspended when the English translation of his incitement to mass murder Ukrainian children who did not appreciate their Russian “liberators” embarrassed the network.
But the point is, Krasovsky knew his market: after all, he’s not just any gushing expert, he’s the former head of all RT’s Russian language programming at the heart of the machine.
Anton Krasovsky said in a program last October that the treatment of Ukrainian children who complained about the Russian occupation was “to drown children like that”. . . They should be thrown into a river with a strong current [or] just stuff them in a spruce house and burn it.
Obviously, it takes enormous courage for a Russian to stand up for the Ukrainians in such an environment. The thousands who demonstrated against the war risked imprisonment, or at least the loss of their jobs: they have mustered the kind of moral strength we in the West, fortunately, never need when we criticize our own government’s policies.
Certainly, given our immeasurably less dangerous life in politics, we have absolutely no right to demand such heroism from Russian citizens.
Amoral
But not protesting publicly is one thing. Giving active consent, even when it’s not necessary, is something else entirely. And the latter is behind the continued strong support for President Putin and his attempt to bombard the Ukrainian people into subjugation.
Last month, Lev Gudkov, head of Russia’s only independent polling firm (Levada), said he was concerned that his countrymen’s support for the war was completely unaffected by the scale of the casualties or the way it had been carried out.
Asked whether respondents strongly questioned the war, he told German magazine Der Spiegel: “No, the attacks on Ukraine and the massacres don’t matter. The Russians have little sympathy for the Ukrainians.’
When Der Spiegel asked him to quantify that, Gudkov replied: “On average, only 10 percent of the population feels guilty or shows empathy – Russian society is amoral.”
He said he was “horrified” when his company conducted an express telephone poll shortly after the invasion and found that 68 percent supported Putin’s decision. Now, he says, the number is still “consistently over 70 percent.” Even if you interpret support as mere approval, that’s still good enough for Putin.
A Russian military defeat in Ukraine — by which I mean being forced to give up all the territory it has seized since invading a year ago — could cause that number to drop from 70 percent.
But I stand by what I wrote last April: such a debacle would not change the mindset of the vast majority of Russians. They would regret the failure of the war, not the loss of Ukrainian lives.
And they certainly would not give up the view that the West, not their own imperial arrogance, was to blame for their misfortunes.
So, no, Joe Biden: This isn’t just Putin’s war. This is Russia’s war.
“Insolentiae” means “impudence” in Latin.
