Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9516433
By the end of 2023, Russians who support a troop withdrawal from Ukraine “without achieving the war goals” were for the first time more numerous than those who oppose such a move. Ordinary Russians consider the war to be the most important negative fact in their lives and want it to end quickly.
This is the conclusion reached by independent sociologists working for Khroniky (“Chronicles”) and the Public Sociology Laboratory projects. It is backed up by those who measure public opinion for the Kremlin.
Other analysts – from Z-bloggers [pro-war bloggers] to clinical psychologists – have also noticed a lack of mass support for the war effort. They all observe that Russians are not ready to protest to end the war, but nonetheless expect Vladimir Putin to end it. As the March presidential election approaches, the Kremlin’s political strategists seem to be trying to meet this demand.
Ukraine is fighting to survive (and they know it) and Ukranian partners have 2 different reasons: the US to test weapon systems against what was supposed to be the 2th best army in the world (and to renovate its arsenal), EU because they are starting to understand that Putin is more and more looking like Hitler in the 1930’s, even if the situation is completely different and probably history cannot be repeated the same way.
This leave Russia (and Putin himself), which seems to have only to lose in all of this: if they retreat, Putin is doomed (the oligarchs would not be happy, to say the least), if they win they still lose: they will end with an ungovernable country that need to be rebuild, task for which they have not the necessary resources, and NATO even bigger since probably a lot of neighboring states would ask to enter NATO.
So in the end my truly cinical opinion is that this war will last until Putin will be “removed” from his position, be by natural causes, oligarchs “causes” or some kind of revolution.