While the sheet While talking to Masha, 25, a resident of St. Petersburg, police were following the protest of a small group of young people against the war in Ukraine this Wednesday (2). The interviewee followed the protesters a few meters away, in fear of being arrested for the second time in three days — she was arrested on Sunday in acts and ordered to pay 10,000 rubles (R$515).
“If I am arrested again, I may have to pay between 30,000 and 100,000 rubles [R$ 1.545 a R$ 5.150] or being detained for more than 15 days,” she said, who asked not to have her last name published for security reasons.
Like Masha, more than 7,300 people have been detained by Russian police since the start of the Ukraine invasion for demonstrating against the war. The extent of adherence to the protests, however, is uncertain. Held in more than 50 cities across the country, they still seem scattered and disorganized.
Some opinion poll data may help explain why this is so. This Wednesday (2), the Levada Center, one of the main independent research institutes in Russia, showed that only 18% of Russians say they would participate in demonstrations with political demands.
Another survey carried out by the center in February, before the invasion of Ukraine, showed that President Vladimir Putin had a 71% approval rating and that 52% of Russians said they had a negative view of Ukraine, up from 43% just three months earlier. in November.
The data contrasts with the 14% approval rating of Putin’s main opponent, Alexei Navalni, who is serving a two-year prison sentence on the fraud charge – he denies and says it is persecution of the judiciary, under Putin’s influence. Even in prison, Navalni, through his team, asked the population to meet every day at 7 pm in the main squares of their cities to demonstrate against the war.
“We will not become a nation of silent and frightened people. Cowards who pretend not to notice the aggressive war unleashed by our obviously insane czar against Ukraine,” the text reads.
The fear of speaking out is well-founded. In recent years, the Kremlin has closed in on anti-government protests, passing laws and amendments that virtually criminalize acts that do not have the approval of local officials — most often allied with Putin. Those who take the risk often end up being arrested immediately by police forces.
According to Vicente Ferraro, a researcher at USP’s Laboratory of Asian Studies, many of the protesters are arrested and taken to the police station, but most are detained for a few hours. Such was the case with Masha, who was arrested along with about 20 protesters and placed on a bus, where she stayed for four hours until she reached the police station in a district outside St. Petersburg.
“The police weren’t too harsh, nobody touched us, but there are other departments where people get beaten up,” he said. Indeed, not all activists receive the same treatment, Ferraro points out.
“Sometimes the regime selects some specific leaders to punish exemplarily. This is a strategy of modern authoritarian regimes: if in the past they intended to arrest all opponents, now they carry out selective and lower cost repression. organize a protest fear not only administrative but criminal prosecution and imprisonment.”
The low age profile is another feature of the anti-war protests in Ukraine. They are mainly made up of young people from a generation that consumes news over the internet, unlike the older ones, who are more vulnerable to state propaganda broadcast on many TV channels linked to the Kremlin.
“This generation is called by academics the ‘Putin generation’; that is, the one that, since birth or childhood, has only lived under the Putin regime. For this population that did not experience the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union , federative conflicts and social crises, this discourse that it is a choice between order and chaos propagated by the government does not work”, says Ferraro.
Not coincidentally, young people had already been the ones who most took a stand against the reforms approved by the Russian government in 2020, which allowed Putin to stay in power until 2036.
Even so, the demonstrations of dissatisfaction have expanded to other spheres, with statements from important personalities of Russian society. Since the beginning of the conflict, scientists, journalists and academics have signed letters denouncing the invasion, and sportsmen have protested against the war.
Spurred on by the heavy sanctions applied by the West against Russia, two businessmen in the president’s circle — Oleg Deripaska, founder of the aluminum giant Rusal, and Mikhail Fridman, born in Ukraine and creator of the multinational conglomerate Alfa-Group — broke the traditional silence of the business community. country on political issues and asked the Kremlin for peace last week.
It is almost certain that this opposition will not be enough for Putin, with all the apparatus created more than 20 years ago, to encounter short-term internal resistance to his military actions. But recent demonstrations show that, at least on the war in Ukraine, his actions are not unanimous.
Born in Yekaterinburg, a 28-year-old girl who asked the sheet so as not to be named, he says he cannot believe Putin’s approval numbers and the Russians’ view of Ukraine.
For her, older people tend to defend some aspects of the Putin government, but not the war. The 90-year-old grandfather, she tells her, is in shock at what is happening.
