Russians Unwilling To Back Ukraine Invasion

Russians backed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 but they are not willing to lose their lives fighting in Ukraine or supporting the Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbas and Luhansk regions, Uliana Pavlova reported for HuffPost.

Photo Insert: In effect, a majority of Russians are psychologically unprepared for war.

The Crimean annexation saw Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings surge above 80 percent. But it hasn’t yet been clear whether or to what extent ordinary Russians support Putin’s current actions in and around Ukraine; tens of thousands of Russian combat troops have massed in three areas on the Ukraine-Russia border.

According to a poll by the independent Levada Center published last month, almost 40 percent of Russians see war as either probable or certain. Almost the same number, 38 percent, consider a war between the two countries unlikely, and another 15 percent completely rule out the possibility. That means, in effect, that a majority of Russians are psychologically unprepared for war.

This is one reason escalation of the conflict with Ukraine could be a tough sell for many Russians. “In an urbanized and modernized society, there are not that many families who are willing to send their boys to a real war,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, told me.

Crimea has always occupied a special place in the Russian imagination dating back to 1783 when the peninsula which juts into the Black Sea was first annexed by the Russian Empire. In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred the Crimean peninsula from one Soviet jurisdiction to another — from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Since they were both Soviet republics, the transfer seemed innocuous. But after the collapse of the USSR, many Russians were saddened that Crimea was now part of another country; they had grown used to thinking of Crimea as an inseparable part of Russia, one of the few warm spots in an otherwise wintry landmass. So when Putin occupied and annexed Crimea, most acquiesced.

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