With many sports and artistic institutions curtailing or severing Russian ties, even the realm of popular culture is not immune. Multiple Russian financial institutions have been blocked from Visa and MasterCard networks. Russia is all but cut off from the international banking system. The European Union has closed its airspace to Russia, banning all Russian aircraft from taking off, landing or overflying EU territory. The reality of isolation from the wider world is also setting in. I’m very upset, as I don’t know when I will be able to go there again.” “I still have very close friends and classmates in western Ukraine,” she said. She has lived in the Russian capital for four decades since coming to the city for her medical studies, but she’s originally from the Ukrainian city of Lutsk and has relatives who are currently spending nights huddled in air-raid shelters. Lebedeva can understand that anxiety better than most. “I see a rise in anxiety,” said Elena Lebedeva, a 57-year-old Moscow psychiatrist. (Dmitri Lovetsky / Associated Press)Īt least in some circles, there is a notable darkening of the mood. Petersburg against the invasion of Ukraine. Russian police detain demonstrators during a March 1, 2022, rally in St. That can be something as simple as suddenly being unable to use Apple Pay or Google Pay in the Moscow metro, which resulted in passenger traffic jams at some stations on Tuesday. People talk by phone and via messaging apps with loved ones in Ukraine, hearing harrowing tales of hardship under Russian bombardment of major cities.Īnd many Russians are experiencing the direct effects of the Western sanctions. Word-of-mouth accounts are spreading among the families of young Russian conscripts. He and other analysts point out that even among Russians who have misgivings about this war, there is widespread acceptance of Putin's insistence that the conflict was whipped up by the West.īut access to social media, even if curtailed, is giving many Russians, particularly younger ones, an unvarnished glimpse of what is taking place in Ukraine. “Look how it’s presented - there is a kind of silence.” “I think that so far, it’s been possible for the Kremlin to keep a very considerable degree of control over the media space, partly due to independent media outlets being closed or under tough pressure,” said Nikolai Petrov, a senior research fellow at the British think tank Chatham House. No mention is made of fierce Ukrainian resistance to a Russian military presence that Putin maintains is a natural consequence of two “brotherly” countries being one and inseparable. And it’s not an unprovoked attack on a neighbor it is a necessary measure of defense against an aggressive, predatory North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States. In the narrative put forth by Russian state-run media, it’s not a war, it’s a special military operation. Putin’s government has gone to enormous lengths to conceal the scope and ferocity - not to mention strategic stumbles - of its ongoing large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was in its sixth day Tuesday.
But those lifestyle changes are now under threat, and that realization is growing daily. In recent decades, Western-style trappings such as smartphones, posh shopping malls and easy, inexpensive travel outside Russia have come to be largely taken for granted, at least among a substantial middle class.
The sea change that has taken place since hostilities erupted last week can perhaps most readily be seen in Russia’s cosmopolitan capital, Moscow, a city utterly transformed since the dour, cabbage-scented days of the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991. “I just couldn’t take in that that was the new reality - that we’d talk about the beginning of a war while having drinks at a bar.” “I didn’t believe until the very end that a war was possible in the 21st century,” said Maria Zherdeva, a 23-year-old research assistant who lives in Moscow. Many people had accepted months of Kremlin assurances that there were no plans to attack Ukraine. Millions of Russians with friends and relatives in Ukraine are heartsick, while others cling to the belief that Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing only what is necessary to protect the motherland against a perfidious West.
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