Commentaries on Regional Media Posts Show Anti-War Attitudes Intensifying in Russia, Bereza Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 7 – The Russian government exercises far greater control over what the media both in Moscow and in the regions posts online than it does over the commentaries that readers then post on articles that are published, making the latter a far better measure of popular attitudes than the former.

            Now former Ukrainian parliamentarian and commentator Borislav Bereza says has mined this neglected source and concluded that anti-war attitudes are on the rise in the Russian Federation (gordonua.com/blogs/borislav-bereza/v-regionah-rf-narastayut-protestnye-nastroeniya-a-desyatki-tysyach-beznogih-bezrukih-invalidov-vernuvshihsya-iz-ukrainy-lish-dobavlyayut-depressii-1612132.html).

“I read the commentaries of Russians attached to articles about the war in Russian regional media,” he writes. “And it is already clear that in Russia there is taking place a gradual disappointment and mass tiredness from what is taking place. There has not been an easy victory and there is no understanding of what the goals of the operation really are.”

 Regime propagandists cannot cope with the evidence Russians see around themselves of Russian soldiers returning from Ukraine either in caskets or badly wounded. Such victims of the war number in the tens of thousands, and the more Moscow seeks to mobilize Russians to fight, the more attention Russians are giving to the victims of Moscow’s war.

 In Soviet times when people saw around them thousands and thousands of those left crippled by World War II, there was a powerful sense among them that such conflicts must never be repeated. Now, the commentaries of Russians suggest that there is an equally powerful sense that the current conflict with similar results must be ended.