Some truths are hard for us to accept. For example, exactly one year after Vladimir Putin sent the tanks to seize full control of Ukraine and decapitate his government, the war still has the overwhelming support of the Russian people.
Regardless of the massacres, torture, shooting of civilians, rape, shelling of hospitals and schools, the forcible transfer to Russia of children from captured Ukrainian territory – independent polls show that about 70 percent of Russians support what in the West is inclined to call ‘Putin’s war’.
That is the phrase our politicians use, at the highest level.
When visiting Poland, a month after the invasion, President Joe Biden insisted that ‘our dispute is not with the Russian people’ and, addressing them directly, declared: ‘This is not who you are.’
It is true that around three-quarters of a million Russians have fled, but that does not mean that everyone is ashamed of what their country is doing. For a significant proportion, it will have been fear of being summoned that caused them to flee, not disgust at their own government’s actions.
In fact, when you look at the kind of material that is published on official television channels, it becomes clear that the authorities believe that there is a great public appetite for the most disgusting treatment of non-compliant Ukrainians, a desire that they are happy to satisfy.
For example, the head of programming for the Russian-language version of RT (formerly Russia Today), Anton Krasovsky, said in a broadcast last October that the way to deal with Ukrainian children who complained of being occupied by Russia was “just to drown children like that.” . . . should be thrown into a river with a solid current [or] just put them in a firehouse and burn it’. Krasovsky was initially defended by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who described him as a “fantastically talented” commentator of “obvious and truthful information”; He was later briefly suspended when the English translation of his incitement to the mass murder of Ukrainian children who did not appreciate their Russian “liberators” embarrassed the channel.
But the point is, Krasovsky knew his market: after all, he’s not just some random delusional pundit, but the former head of all RT’s Russian-language programming, at the heart of the machine.
