Internet Outages Hitting Russia’s Regions Far Harder than Russian Cities with Far-Reaching Consequences for Demography, Media Use and National Security, Nisnevich Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 11 – Until a year or two ago, Moscow celebrated the extension of the internet to ever more cities and villages of the Russian Federation; but now, there are ever more cases when providers are turning off the internet to these places, with far-reaching consequences for the country as a whole, Yuliy Nisnevich says.  

            Even more than television, the extension of the internet to small towns and villages in the Russian Federation reduced the differences between life there and life in the cities because rural Russians could get things local institutions couldn’t supply, a development that helped tie the country together, the HSE scholar says (newizv.ru/news/2025-12-11/smysla-zhizni-bez-interneta-net-kak-provintsiya-perezhivaet-otklyucheniya-seti-438158).

            Without the internet, Nisnevich says, “residents of villages and rural settlements now live as they did in Soviet times. There is no telephone, people can’t use banking services, televised media don’t work, and one can’t even call  taxi.” Older people sink into their old ways, but younger people are increasingly inclined to flee to the cities.

            As a result, over the last five years, the rural population of the Russian Federation has fallen by 804,000, three times the size of the decline of the population of cities, Rosstat satistics show. There are many causes for this, of course; but the increasing unreliability of internet services in rural areas is certainly one of them.

            According to Nisnevich, internet outages are leading to “a new fragmentation in the country,” one in which young people are fleeing to the cities and older age groups are returning to television, not because either especially wants to but because they had been increasingly relying on the Internet and now can’t.

New Presidential Elections in Ukraine will Not Only Further Unite that Nation but Lead It to Recommit to Joining Europe, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 13 – Vladimir Putin has insisted that Ukraine commit to holding new presidential elections as part of any peace deal, confident that he will be able to subvert them, oust Volodymyr Zelensky, and bring to power in Kyiv a new leader who will turn away from Europe and back to Russia.

            But according to Novaya Gazeta observer Andrey Kolesnikov, Putin is completely wrong; and any new elections whoever wins will result in a Ukraine more united and more committed to joining Europe than has ever been the case in the past  (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2025/12/13/posmotrite-na-nas).

            That outcome, he continues, reflects not only the sacrifices that the Ukrainian people have made to resist Russian aggression but also the idea that Zelensky himself articulated in 2019. He told the Ukrainians then that their vote had shown them and the world that “everything was and is possible.”

            That is one of the most important reasons behind Putin’s decision to launch his expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He could not afford other countries, including his own, that have emerged from the disintegration of the USSR to reach the same conclusion. But nothing that he has done, Kolesnikov suggests, can shake the confidence of Ukrainians that that is so

Russian Society will Continue to Degrade Even after Putin Leaves the Scene, Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 15 – Despite the hopes and even expectations of many that Russia will fundamentally change directions after Putin’s departure from power, Lev Gudkov argues that the degradation that Russian society has experienced under him will almost certainly continue long into the future.

            The senior sociologist at the Levada Center argues that there are two reasons for that. On the one hand, given the disappointments Russians have suffered from the failure of reforms in the 1990s, they do not see any real alternative to the authoritarianism they defer to (mostmedia.org/ru/posts/kak-vygljadit-rossyskoe-budushee-posle-putina-otvechaet-nauchnyi-rukovoditel-levada-centra-lev-gudkov).

            And on the other, Gudkov continues, “all preceding culture which we have had was a hypocritical adaption to the existing order and to a repressive state.” That state weakened somewhat in the 1990s, “but our people then wanted not freedom but an increase in consumption and wanted to live as in Western countries.”

            Even then, only a few organizations largely supported by grants from abroad wanted democracy; and as a result, “the main institutions of a totalitarian society, that is, the army, the KGB and the judicial system” remained in place even if they were renamed And the Russian population accepted that “as a given” rather seeing this as something that must be changed. 

            The Putin regime has done everything it can to encourage such attitudes, the sociologist says; and consequently, any change in the bureaucracy or the population is unlikely anytime soon. There is a chance, of course, “but it is weak” – and expecting that it will happen without some cataclysmic event is almost certainly an illusion.

            Indeed, he continues, Levada Center polls show that “80 to 85 percent of Russians do not want to take part in politics viewing it as ‘a dirty business’ or something for which they don’t have time.” Consequently, they are unlikely to mobilize and put pressure on the state for real change and will continue to defer to it, something Putin’s successors will exploit as he has.

            Given that, Gudkov concludes, “the most likely scenario is a gradual decline of Russia to the status of a regional power, weak and corrupt, a type of pariah state dependent on more powerful countries like China. In response, democratic countries will erect some kind of fence, a barrier, to isolate this disaster zone.”

Despite Kremlin Propaganda, Barely Half of Students in a Typical Russian Oblast Identify as ‘Citizens of Russia,’ New Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 15 – Under Putin, Russian schools have promoted patriotism and called on students to identify first and foremost as citizens of Russia; but a new sociological study of 653 students in higher educational institutions in Oryol Oblast suggests that this Kremlin effort has been far from successful.

            Fifty-two percent identified as  citizens of Russiaople while over a third said they were simply people (Viktor Sapryka et al., “On the formation of civic identity among students of Oryol Oblast” (in Russian), Vestnik Instituta sotsiologii, 16:2 (2025): 86-107, full text at https://www.vestnik-isras.ru/files/File/Vestnik_2025_53/Sapryka_i_ko_53_86-107.pdf).

            Because Oryol is a typical predominantly ethnic Russian federal subject, Yevgeny Chernyshov of the Nakanune news agency says, these findings are likely typical for ethnic Russian areas as a whole and highlight the ineffectiveness of existing programs of patriotic education in the Russian Federation (nakanune.ru/articles/124187/).

            In part, of course, this lack of identification as citizens of the Russian Federtion is generational; but in part, Chernyshov suggests, it highlights the fact that students have a relatively poor knowledge of their country’s history and are affected by foreign news that has left them with an inaccurate or at least in complete understanding of Russia’s place in the world

Three Distinct Groups Form Russian Opposition to Putin’s War in Ukraine, ‘Chronicles Project’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 10 – The share of Russians who oppose Putin’s war in Ukraine has stayed remarkably stable since 2022 at about 20 percent; but this segment of the population is not the monolith many think, Vsevolod Bederson, a researcher at the Chronicles Project says. Rather they consist of three groups which together form a complex mosaic.

            Just under half of this 20 percent (45 percent) form the core of consistent peace supporters, he says surveys show. These people oppose the war, give priority to social spending, and would support a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine (ridl.io/ru/ne-blok-a-mozaika-portret-rossijskih-protivnikov-vojny-v-tsifrah/).

            The second of these three groups, which he calls “the anti-war voters,” forms 14 percent of the opposition. They oppose the war, voted in 2024 but not for Putin and favor elected mayors. And the third, “anti-war non-voters” who form 41 percent of the opposition, are against the war, but did not vote in 2024 although favor elected mayors.

            These groups vary not only in their focus but also in terms of their composition and actions. The anti-war voters are disproportionately aged 40 to 49. The anti-war non-voters are mostly young. And the core opposition group in contrast to the other two is almost evenly distributed in terms of age.

            While most in all three say the war has had a negative impact on their lives, there is a significant divergence in the shares who say that “nothing has changed.” “In the narrow core and among non-voters,” Bederson says, “roughly a quarter give this answer while among the politically active anti-war voters, this figure is only six to seven percent.”

            Another importance variance among them is that nearly a third of all opponents of the war say their relatives experienced repression in Soviet times, “but among anti-war voters, the share having family memories of Soviet terror is significantly higher – 44 percent,” the Chronicles analyst reports.

            In terms of other behaviors, the three groups vary as well. The narrow core and non-voters “are considerably more likely to have helped the army and much less likely to have given aid to refugees while “among the active anti-war voters, the reverse is true: these are much less likely to have provide help for the military and much more likely to have helped refugees.

In Just 50 Years, Russia will have More Muslims than Orthodox Christians, Russian Priest Now Living in France Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 13 – If current demographic trends continue, with fertility rates among Russians significantly lower than among historically Muslim nations in that country, Hieromonk Ioann says, 50 years from now, -- that is in 2075 -- Russia will have more Muslims than Orthodox Christians and thus have the right to call itself a Muslim country.

            The Russian Orthodox priest who left Russia a year ago because of opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine argues that in fact Russia is becoming Muslim much more rapidly than that as many who call themselves Orthodox do so are not believers believing while Muslims are far more committed (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2025/12/13/glubokaia-dukhovnaia-turbulentnost).

            He bases his conclusions on Russian census data, interior ministry reporting about attendance at religious services, and sociological studies and points out that it is the combination of ethnic Russian decline and non-Russian Muslim growth that is behind what many will view as a civilizational shift. 

            According to the priest now in emigration in France, the declining size of Russian Orthodoxy in Russia under current arrangements will be “a stimulus for the rebirth in Russia of a free Orthodox church,” a development that will allow everyone to see that the ROC MP as currently run is in fact less a church than “a form of paganism, an imperial-militarist cult.”

Putin Says Restoration of USSR Excluded Because It would ‘Critically Change’ Ethnic and Religious Composition of Russia’s Population

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 10 – Putin has often said the disintegration of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century;” but as the editors of Nezavisimaya Gazeta observer, “he has never called for a restoration of the Soviet Union in any form” although he has said that the former republics should remain close and not link themselves to Russia’s enemies.

            Two recent statements, the editors say, explain why he has adopted that position. On the one hand, his press spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently told journalists that Putin “doesn’t want to restore the USSR because this is impossible” and “to speak about that possibility doesn’t show respect to our partners and allies in the CIS” (ng.ru/editorial/2025-12-10/2_9398_red.html).

            And on the other, in an interview with Indian journalists, Putin himself declared, the newspaper’s editors say, that the restoration of the USSR is “simply excluded” because it would “critically change both the ethnic and the religious composition of the population of the Russian Federation.” (emphasis supplied)

            Nezavisimaya Gazeta suggests that Putin has changed his vocabulary when speaking about this issue in response to the changing domestic and foreign policy situations he finds himself in, sometimes expressing more openly imperialistic and sometimes less imperialistic attitudes.

            But despite that, he has never departed from the view that the USSR cannot be restored – and now he has made clearer than ever before that his reason for advancing that view is not so much his belief that the Soviet system didn’t work but rather because a new USSR would have demographic consequences he doesn’t want – and that would lead to a further disintegration.  

            For a discussion of how that could happen and why Putin feels himself compelled to avoid setting the stage for a third round of the disintegration of the Russian state that those seeking the restoration of the USSR are unwittingly setting the stage for, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/03/putin-thinks-he-is-restoring-soviet.html.

           This is not to say, of course,  that Putin won't pursue the inclusion of parts of other countries like Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan which he believes are naturally part of Russia and whose incorporation would not change the ethnic and religious mix of the Russian Federation to a dangerous degree