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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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The Russian people are not making these decisions. Moreover, those who have left Russia are probably among the least likely to support Russia anyway.
What good comes from attacking the people of a country because you disagree with the leadership of the country? This is the same disgusting rhetoric used in the USA after 9/11 where there were widespread calls to kick out ALL Muslims and people from the middle east.
Something around 80 percent of russians actually support Russian imperialistic goals. You can't exactly pity them at this point. The protests were almost non existant in Russia.
Even if Putin drops down tommorow, it's likely that the whole Russia expansion desire remains. Shit even Navalny doesn't want to drop occupied Georgia.
Those polls you got your source from are actually polls done by state-run polling facilities. of course poeple are going to say what the state wants to hear. here's a video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uQCNjIHeqU
Btw, by saying that "80% of Russians support this war", you're spreading Russian state propaganda.
And of course protests in Russia died down, people get jailed for like 10-15 years in prison if they protest, so by fear of getting jailed, protestors stop. it isn't pretty but it's how the system works.
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These stats are more or less what is reported in my country. Can't fact check everything, since it's more or less the first time it got some shade. Most pro-russian populus here also support Putin and find Ukrainians as nazis, so this didn't seem far fetched.
Seeing different level of protests in Russia (against the war) and in Belarus (against Lukashenko) does show that participation was/is quite little. Even before the war, there were larger protests after Navalny.
There were a few Russians I can deeply respect and can call good russians, but they are the minority sadly. For example Ruslan Zizin.
Gary Kasparov too
Where do those stats come from? The stats I have found are significantly lower than that. It is also important to note that Russians who are against Putin and the war are far less likely to respond to a survey asking them about the war. In the survey I found, only 18% of citizens surveyed that were against Putin felt comfortable sharing this. It's not at all unlikely that many were too scared to say they were against the war.
It feels you are heavily oversimplifying this to support your beliefs. Even if it were true that most Russians supported the war, many of them are faced with constant propaganda, and it would not be entirely fair to contribute this to any moral failing.
He's parroting Russian state-led polls, which many people in Russia either just hang up because they just don't want to answer, or say what the state wants to hear. You can see how lopsided this becomes, with many people just saying yes because they don't want to be jailed for opposing the government. Even if some people do have the guts to say no, the votes saying yes will overshadow them massively.
And ironically by that guy spreading that poll and notion around, he's spreading Russian propaganda.
I'm not saying or suggesting moral failing. Just saying that most of them are indoctrinated to a fault. Russians that ran from mobilization is protesting in a way, although a lot still have the same problem of "Russia big, Russia Strong".
The real problem is that there are desires for neo-colonialism, and imperialism in almost every Russian. They grew up with that. It's all they know. They can't be trusted. They are incompatible with big chunk of EU.
Replace russian with jews and think about how your comment sounds again.
Of course it's not like all russians are against this war, both because of propaganda and the imperialism in the culture (though again that's very perpetuated by propaganda). That doesn't mean all of them support it, the numbers are also definitely not actually 80%, and even if they were 80% i can't put into words how fucked up it is to discriminate against the other 20%, almost 30 million people, just because you perceive the majority as being bad.
People are sanctioned, people are unhappy, people protest their government that allowed it to happen. It's how you put pressure on the leadership of a country. How else would you solve this? You can't force Russia's hand in this, but you can make the situation for their people uncomfortable.
The alternative would be to say "Russia pls open the grain corridor again" and I think you can imagine their response.
There’s an abundance of contemporary evidence that shows this doesn’t work but it’s basically a foreign policy meme at this point. We tried this in Iraq and it just ended up killing a bunch of children and had no effect on Saddam’s hold on power.
This doesn't follow. First of all, no change happens internally in the USA despite its own citizens complaining of material conditions; so to say that people being unhappy and protesting necessarily leads to change is false. Second, every other sentence people say about Russia is calling it "authoritarian", "dictatorship", etc: you can't simultaneously pretend its an authoritarian dictatorship and also that the people protesting have any say in its trajectory.
Which is just wrong. You're making the everyday civilian uncomfortable. You aren't doing anything against those who actually make decisions. Instead you're punishing someone for their nationality, or where they were born or choose to live. It's punishment for something they didn't do and it's not constructive.
Sure, I understand that you're saying Russia isn't going to just cooperate with requests. But it's also not going to be any more likely to cooperate because you've made the lives of their citizens, or people of Russian ethnicity living on foreign soil, any harder.
In the end this just punishes innocent people and does nothing to achieve the stated goal.
Sanctions have never once shown to lead to regime change. There’s entire books on the effects of sanctions, it can actually serve to strengthen support. The primary effect of sanctions, in every case though, is suffering for the regular people.
When dialogue fails, war follows.
Russia does not seem interested in dialogue whatsoever
Because the only way to force change in a country, is to push it's people to make that change. It mught not be pretty, but it's reality.
And what power do Russian expatriots have to effect change in their home country exactly? Huge numbers left precisely because they disagree with the politics, which poses a huge demographic problem for Russia. Forcing them to go back would be counterproductive, not to mention plain xenophobic.
You can't simultaneously call Russia an authoritarian dictatorship and say that its people have the power to change the country's trajectory.
The correct way to say this is: "the only way to force change in a country, is to push the people who can make change to make that change".
Because authoritarian dictators have never been overthrown by their people? Not entirely disagreeing with you, it's a big hurdle to overcome for change but it does happen in plenty of countries
Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.