As Putin’s War in Ukraine Drags On, Russians are Beginning to Listen to the Opposition, a Harbinger of Future Challenges to the Kremlin, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 13 – “When a war remains somewhere far away, it is easy to support it,” Abbas Gallyamov says; but when it begins to affect one’s own life or the lives of families and friends, it becomes less so – and a process begins which initially reduces popular backing for the war but then for the regime that launched it.

            The opposition Russian commentator who earlier served as a Putin speechwriter argues that at first, Russians like other peoples back the authorities  and accept the notion that what their enemies are doing is the result of the nature of those enemies rather than the product of what Russia and Russians have done (vot-tak.tv/92058694/vojna-i-nastroeniya-rossiyan).

            But as research on other countries at war, including totalitarian states like Nazi Germany has shown, he continues, when the war drags one people begin to ask whether the costs of the war are the result of their own government and even themselves rather than entirely the result of the nature of those fighting against them.

            “At the first stage of a war, especially in authoritarian countries where opposing the powers entails serious risks, the basic part of the society easily falls into jingoism.” But as the war continues, people begin to question the arguments for the war and even more the broader actions those responsible for the war have taken.

“Initially the majority of Russian residents saw no connection between their own bombing of Ukraine and the strikes coming from the other side—reasoning that ‘they are bombing us not because we are bombing them, but because they are fascists,’" now much as was true with the citizens of Nazi Germany, other causal relationships are being recognized.”

Ever more Russians are increasingly recognizing that what the Ukrainians are doing “are merely a reaction to steps taken by the Russian military;” and some of them, “no longer satisfied” with what the Kremlin is saying, are “beginning to listen to the opposition that they had refused to listen to only yesterday.”

In an authoritarian state like Putin’s Russia, this shift is neither universal nor instantaneous and will take some time to spread and intensify. Those Russians whose regions have been directly attacked by Ukrainian forces will ask these questions sooner and more insistently demanding to know why Moscow hasn’t defended them.

But they will be joined by others, Gallyamov says, concluding that he believes “during the phase of the weakening of the regime when the question of the country’s disintegration will once again raise to the national agenda as it did after the 1917 revolution and again at the end of perestroika, separatist sentiment will enful not just national republics but also border regions most devastated by the war.”

Russians living in those areas, he says, “may well decide that they no longer wish to remain bound to Moscow; and the concept of an independent ‘Central Russian Republic’ is thus becoming an entirely realistic prospect,” however little attention is now being given to the broader tectonic shifts that is making that outcome ever more likely.

Poorer Ethnic Russian Regions Now ‘at Brink of Demographic Collapse,’ ‘Club of Regions’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 13 – Muslim republics in the North Caucasus still have fertility rates at or near the replacement levels; and oil and gas-producing federal subjects with higher incomes also have fertility levels close to replacement levels. But ethnic Russian regions without such resources are “at the brink of demographic collapse,” according to the Club of Regions portal.

            In an analysis of data assembled by the To Be Precise portal last month, the regionalist portal says that to this point, Moscow has not adapted its maternal capital program to these differences among three and thus instead of helping to improve Russia’s demographic situation is in fact making it worse (club-rf.ru/theme/660).         

            Moscow’s one-size-fits-all approach fails not only to recognize these differences but others as well, including between the better off and the poorer components of the population in the Russian regions with oil and gas reserves and higher incomes. There, what Moscow is doing is helping the better off strata of the population but doing little to slow the decline of the poor.

            The Kremlin’s maternal capital program has not prevented fertility rates from falling to one (in Vladimir Oblast, the fertility rate is 1.059) or even less than one (in Leningrad Oblast, the figure is now 0.914), both of which are far below the 2.2 fertility rate needed to keep the population stable.

            Not only are Moscow’s policies pushing down the fertility rate in these predominantly ethnic Russian regions but they are accelerating the outflow of young people and pushing the number of births down still further, putting these places “on the brink of demographic collapse” and harming the country as a whole as a result.

Moscow Now Using Artificial Intelligence for Censorship of Books to the Point of Ridiculousness, Orekh Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 9 – “Judging from everything,” Anton Orekh says, “the texts of books are passing through artificial intelligence algorithms because real censors already aren’t in a position to intensify the checking of all printed production. Machines are tireless but stupid,” and this leads to absurdities in the system.

            These algorithms, which sometimes classify books as fit for publication or as restricted to certain age groups, are sometimes based on a single word or phrase that may be used very differently in different situations, a possibility reliance on algorithms ignores (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/03/09/kniga-opasna-dlia-vashego-zdorovia).

            That leads to absurdities when an algorithm concludes that a book should be banned or listed as only for adults without any consideration of context, something human censors usually could be counted on to do and thus classifications of books in such a way as to make the entire censorship system in Russia absurd on its face.

Ever More Russian Regions Slashing Healthcare Spending as Putin’s War in Ukraine Continues

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 10 – In 2025, five federal subjects cut spending on healthcare by more than ten percent; this year, the number that have slashed spending on that critical sector has increased to 19, nearly a quarter of all subjects and the largest number and largest total cut in medical spending since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022.

            Hardest hit so has been the Vologda Oblast where spending on medical operations fell by 39 percent year on year. Irkutsk and Kemerovo oblasts cut their spending by more than 30 percent; and Moscow and Volgograd each cut their by more than a quarter, the Important Stories portal says (istories.media/stories/2026/03/10/v-2026-godu-rekordnoe-za-vremya-voini-chislo-regionov-sokratili-raskhodi-na-zdravookhranenie/

            “Even in regions where budget cuts are smaller,” the portal says, “the primary healthcare sector is struggling,” especially outside the regional capitals. And that means among other things that Russians on average are getting less medical care than they need or even the amount that they had before Putin launched his expanded war.

            Some regional leaders have tried to keep the cuts from being too deep by borrowing from banks, but the Kremlin frowns on this – and has even made the amount of such debate a key performance indicator in its rating of governors, a fact of life that is keeping ever more governors from trying to do so.

            That means the healthcare of Russians is declining and likely will continue to do so as long as the war continues, something neither regional leaders nor the population have any control over but that both recognize is the result of a Moscow policy that is increasing their suffering at a rapid rate. 

Kazakhstan Portal Says Chinese Analysts have Concluded Russia Today Resembles the USSR in Its Final Years

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 9 – Analysts around the world have reported about the way in which Chinese scholars have studied the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggesting that Beijing hoped to learn from that event and thus being in a position to avoid something similar happening to China.

            But they have devoted less attention to Chinese commentaries suggesting that what is happening in Russia today resembles what happened three decades ago. An exception to that is a Kazakh commentary which suggests Chinese analysts now believe that the Russian Federation could follow the USSR into the dustbin of history unless it changes course.

            According to Kazakhstan’s Altyn-Orda portal, analysts in China believe that Russia once again suffers from the two key factors which brought down the USSR: an overreliance on earnings from the export of raw materials, the price of which it does not control; and deteriorating relations with foreign states that are stronger than Russia (altyn-orda.kz/kitajskie-analitiki-vsyo-chashhe-sravnivayut-rossiyu-s-pozdnim-sssr/).

            “If  Russia isn’t able to reduce the raw-materials dependence of its economy and at the same time continues its course of harsh confrontation with the West,” Chinese analysts believe in the Altyn-Orda account, “then the country may encounter still more serious consequences than even those which the Soviet Union suffered at the end of the 20^th century.”

            The Kazakhstan article says that Chinese analysts are not saying that Russia is on the brink of disintegration now but rather is behaving in ways that unless changed make that or some other disaster possible in the coming years unless Moscow makes progress in changing one or both of these policy lines.

New Moscow Study Suggests 2022 Protests against Mobilization Far More Widespread than Reported at the Time

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 9 – The Russian government’s Academy of Economics and State Service has released the results of a study it undertook in response to the 2022 protests against Putin’s partial mobilization in various parts of that country. Its findings suggest these protests were even more widespread than has been acknowledged.

            The study examined what it calls efforts by outside actors to influence the situation among young people at that time in 39 federal subjects, just under half of the total. Given that blaming “outside agitators” is Moscow’s preferred way of explaining protests, that suggests that significant anti-mobilization protests took place in these but not other places.

            For discussions of this study and what it may say about Moscow’s perception of the state of protest activity, see verstka.media/v-ranhigs-zayavili-o-vneshnem-informaczionnom-davlenii-na-molodyozh-v-45-regionah and kavkazr.com/a/dagestan-nazvali-glavnoy-tseljyu-informatsionnyh-atak-na-molodezhj-severnogo-kavkaza/33699641.html.

            Two things support this conclusion about how widespread the protests were at that time. First, the list of problem regions in the new study includes many predominantly ethnic Russian federal subjects where protest activity was slight or not reported at all when the mobilization was declared.

And second, in the North Caucasus, the list includes Dagestan where protests were massive and widely reported but not Chechnya, Ingushetia, Karachayevo-Cherkesiya and Kabardino-Balkaria where protests were smaller or even non-existent at least to judge from reportage at the time.

If this interpretation is correct, then it appears likely that the Academy’s study was ordered by the Kremlin in anticipation that Putin may feel compelled to announce another partial mobilization and that officials are now trying to anticipate just how much opposition there would be given how much there was four years ago. 

Only about Half of Moscow University Students Committed Patriots, New Academy of Sciences Study Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 10 – Only just over half -- 52 percent -- of Moscow university students are committed patriots above all, according to a new survey of 1,000 of them carried out by sociologists at the Russian Academy of Sciences, while 28 percent are less fully oriented toward patriotic values and 24 percent are largely indifferent to them.

            The study which appears in the current issue of the Moscow Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology (jourssa.ru/index.php/jourssa/article/view/2650/2557) had the students express their support or opposition on a seven point scale in response to various statements about patriotism and loyalty (discussed at nakanune.ru/articles/124433/).

            While 89 percent of the sample said that they considered themselves patriots, obviously the preferred answer, “in all three groups, those who feel a sense of responsibility for their families dominated over a sense of responsibility for the future of Russia which was in each case in the last place.”

            In part, of course, the sociologists said, in the words of Nakanune, “this can be explained by the fact that each individual is oriented to a greater degree on those around him that on the country as a whole.” But it is worrisome that a quarter of Russian students say they don’t feel responsible to work for Russia, worry about its future, and aren’t interested in its history.

            Perhaps even more interesting and perhaps disturbing to the Kremlin were the answers of the students as to what they believe patriotism to be. They were asked to choose among eight different definitions. The idea that “patriotism is a relic of the past” received the least support, but the notion that “patriotism hinders cultural development” was second from the bottom.

            At the other end of the scale, the students as a whole gave their highest agreement to the proposition that “patriotism is an integral component of Russian culture;” but just below that, the students said that patriotism was “a strictly personal matter. And in the middle of the rankings, 40 percent said that “patriotism is a technique of state control.”

            Perhaps surprisingly and for some alarmingly, those in the moderately patriotic group were more likely to agree with the last proposition than are those who are the least inclined to say they are patriotic.