“Ukrainians have never done me any harm, I don’t understand why we have to kill them now.”
“This is not a military operation, this is war!”
“Putin wages war at our expense, we pay for his games.”
Users of VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social medium, are increasingly negative about the war against Ukraine. Since the introduction of the mobilization there has been strong criticism of the invasion, despite strict censorship laws. This is evident from an analysis by de Volkskrant from over 30,000 posts about the war on VKontakte’s popular city forums.
The growing criticism of the social medium indicates growing dissatisfaction with the war among the Russians. Russian public opinion has been a great mystery since the beginning of the invasion. The results of opinion polls are deceptive, because opponents of the war cannot speak freely: anyone who criticizes them can be sentenced to a fine or years in prison.
VKontakte is similar to Facebook and claims to have nearly 50 million daily users in Russia (population: 144 million). Many supporters of the political opposition to President Putin have left VKontakte in recent years, as the network passes user data to Russian intelligence — the network is owned by Russian businessmen affiliated with the Kremlin.
Arrows on the President
The remaining users of VKontakte are now increasingly turning against Putin. While the state media blames lower-ranking commanders for setbacks in the war, Russians on VKontakte city forums (pages with often hundreds of thousands of members in which residents discuss the news – locally as well as internationally –) are aiming directly at the president.
Their anger often stems from the mobilization, which is chaotic and much less partial than Putin makes out. “Putin is a pathological liar,” writes a Novosibirsk resident. A member of a St. Petersburg news forum about Putin: ‘Anyone who does not keep promises is not a man.’ A resident of Yekaterinburg says he doesn’t believe in Putin’s rationale for the war: ‘Who attacked Russia? Why mobilization?’
Also, fewer and fewer people are sticking to Putin’s terminology for the war. Initially, in discussions of the invasion, people spoke of “the special military operation,” a term Putin uses to keep the war far from the population. But since August, when the Russian military lost momentum and losses began to mount rapidly, they have spoken more of a war than an operation. From a discussion on the most popular VKontakte forum of provincial city Krasnodar: ‘We are destroying our economy, sending our soldiers to their deaths, destroying cities, killing civilians.’ A fellow townsman responds in agreement: ‘Heroes are people who defend their country, not who attack another country.’