If before the war one third of the public were against Putin and the government, now it is just 20 percent." To quote Denis Volkov from the independent Levada pollster (declared a foreign agent in Russia): "The fighting help to consolidate support behind Putin and the state, because it is understood as Russia versus the West. Accordingly, republics which are mixed or predominantly non-ethnic Russian, Buryatia or Dagestan for example, tend to be as if not more patriotic than others.įurthermore, local ethnic groups, especially Russia's Muslim minorities in the Caucasus, tend to be more traditional in outlook than ethnic Russians in the big urban centres and therefore more wed to the paternalistic, patriotic narrative espoused by their president.ĭiscontent with Moscow and the war in Ukraine has yet to manifest itself in Russia in any meaningful way. It can be preferable to believe your son or husband died for a reason and to cling on to the patriotic narrative you hear day in, day out, than to question what it was all for. Nor does losing a family member on the battlefields of Ukraine necessarily turn someone against the war. But the government has invested heavily in trying to ensure social stability through higher salaries and pensions and ensuring that payouts to those involved in the war, and to their families, remains incentivising. Regions which have seen larger numbers of men mobilised with concomitant casualty rates tend to be poorer, where an army contract is big money. If anything, the socio-economic impulses unleashed by war and mobilisation have served to bind the regions closer to the centre, irrespective of the ethnic make up of the 83 federal subjects which constitute the Russian Federation (the Kremlin would count Crimea and Sevastopol as bringing the tally to 85 but Crimea is recognised as Ukrainian territory under international law). Mention of the possibility of Russian secessionism and the break-up of the Russian Federation comes from two quarters at the moment - intermittent Western hypothesising and Vladimir Putin's assertions that a collapse of the country into its constituent parts is exactly what the West is out to achieve.Ībsent from the discourse is any kind of domestic clamour regarding separatism. Our Moscow correspondent Diana Magnay has picked this one up. Today's comes from reader William Nash, who asks: Could some of the states in Russia with non-Russian ethnic groups try to secede like Chechnya did in the 1990s due to discontent with Moscow and the war in Ukraine? Questions about the Ukraine war continue to flow in for our senior correspondents and military experts.
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