Far from being massive, the movement of opposition to the offensive led by Moscow in his neighbor nevertheless reaches citizens hitherto apolitic.
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It is an underground and profound movement that is still difficult to measure the magnitude. Since their president decided to invade Ukraine, many Russians, for some perfectly apolitical, share their shock or opposition.
Many have understood, as soon as the war trigger, Thursday, February 24, what this decision contained irremediable. Dmitry Mouratov, editor of the Journal Novaïa Gazeta and Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, summarized this feeling of a vertiginous formula: “The future is dead,” he launched a journalist from the dojd television muffled by emotion.
Since, the signs of profound tears within the Russian population multiply, between those who support the operation of “Dénazification” as calls Moscow, those who ignore everything or almost (dojd, broadcast only on the internet, is the only television that shows images of the conflict and collects testimonials to Kiev or Kharkiv) and those who say “no”.
The manifestations are scattered and disorganized, both launching a call in this direction is risky, and they are particularly watched by power. For four days that the offensive against Ukraine began, about 5,700 people were arrested in gatherings across Russia; These are more numerous but less supplied than those who had accompanied the triggering of the war in the Donbass, in 2014.
Bypass Strategy
The hardness is necessary: in Rostov-sur-le-Don, Russian city near the border with the Donbass and the Azov Sea, a young woman received eight days in prison for “disobedience to the police “To have gone, alone in the street, with a white sign – a slogan nonexistent for an invisible war.
Many more are those who understand their opinion of a simple message on social networks: black wallpaper, Ukrainian flag, hashtags “no to war” or “I am ashamed”. Those who answer them “I do not have a shame” and proudly display the tricolor flag of Russia are at least as many. Graffiti “no to war” have also been noticed in several Russian cities; They are erased as fast as were, in the winter, those supporting the opponent Alexei Navalny, but more numerous than then.
The flowers have also become a means of expression, a bypass strategy against which the police can still – nothing. Hundreds of bouquets have been filed in recent days in front of the building of the Ukraine Embassy in Moscow. Sunday, it is the improvised memorial at the opponent murdered Boris Nemtsov, at the foot of the Kremlin, that we have seen bloom. On February 27, 2015, the former Deputy Prime Minister had been shot dead, already on the bottom of war in Ukraine, as he was documenting the involvement of the Russian army, secret held.
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