By Alexander Rubinstein, The Grayzone, 8/21/23

A PR offensive to inundate the American public with pro-Ukraine war advertisements during the 2024 election is the latest initiative of neocon chickenhawk Bill Kristol. While targeted at GOP voters, the campaign appears to be another Democratic Party front.

Defending Democracy Together, a neoconservative outfit led by career chickenhawk scribe Bill Kristol, has launched a new initiative called “Republicans for Ukraine” to transform the 2024 presidential election into a referendum on US funding for the NATO proxy war. 

Urging Republicans in Congress to support more funding for Ukraine in the upcoming appropriations bill is also a key item on the agenda.

Kristol had defined himself as a leader of the Republican Party’s neoconservative faction, bashing isolationist and antiwar GOP figures on the pages of his now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine while laying the intellectual groundwork for the invasion of Iraq through his Project for a New American Century. 

By fashioning his Defending Democracy Together as a bastion of Never Trumpism, Kristol was able to ingratiate himself with elite Democrats eager for Republican allies in their messianic battle against the Bad Orange Man. His anti-Trump efforts ultimately earned him a cringeworthy MSNBC tribute celebrating the unrepentant neocon as “Woke Bill Kristol.”

Now, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive fails and a majority of Americans declare opposition for the first time to sending more military aid to Ukraine, Kristol is launching a multimillion dollar ad blitz to keep the tanks slogging through the Donbas mud and the dark money flowing into his bank accounts.

“Ukrainian troops fought alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they are fighting to defend their democracy,” Kristol’s campaign announces on its website. “Most importantly, American military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine has helped them weaken Russia.”

His initiative has therefore invoked the military debacles that turned the GOP base firmly against neoconservatism and into the arms of Trump, presenting Ukraine’s participation in these forever wars as justification for a new one. 

And as we will see, Kristol’s supposedly Republican operation has been funded by a top Democratic Party donor with close ties to US intelligence.

Pro-war ads for a GOP base turning firmly against NATO’s proxy war

To generate viral content for its $2 million “Republicans for Ukraine” campaign, Defending Democracy Together gathered testimony from 50 GOP voters, drawing from a base of mostly white collar baby boomers alienated by the non-interventionist direction of the party base. 

In each testimonial, the interviewees spouted boilerplate talking points on “defending democracy” and opposing authoritarianism that could have just as easily been produced by senior fellows at any arms industry funded think tank on DC’s K Street. 

One veteran featured in the campaign claims he spent two decades fighting the “Soviet Union’s threat to freedom,” and offers his hope that Republicans for Ukraine “can serve as counterprogramming to conservative radio and TV show hosts who are challenging additional aid to Ukraine.”

Some of the ads display a geopolitical paranoia far beyond the scope of average American voters. Teresa Benson from Minnesota, for example, is worried that “if nobody tries to stop [Putin] in Ukraine, that next he would attack Moldova and any other non-NATO countries in the area.”

The campaign’s advertisements will air “on cable and network TV and digitally on Youtube through the end of the year.” The outfit has even purchased ad space on Fox News during the first Republican primary debate on August 23 being held in Milwaukee.

In addition to the ads, the group has also purchased 10 strategically placed billboards in Milwaukee, urging debate attendees to “support Ukraine” and “Stand up to Putin.” Hints that the operation may expand can be found within a Google Drive folder maintained by the campaign, entitled “Billboards – August 2023.”

One image is labeled “ukraine-times-square-01.”

“Too many of the party’s leaders seem to think there’s no penalty to be paid for standing against Ukrainian democracy and America’s role in supporting the fight for freedom,” said Gunner Ramer, the campaign’s national spokesman. Among Ramer’s first positions out of college was an internship for the longshot pro-war 2016 presidential candidate and former CIA intelligence officer Evan McMullin.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Defending Democracy Together co-founder and former alcohol industry lobbyist Sarah Longwell lamented shifts within the Republican Party base. These included Republicans becoming “more protectionist on trade,” and “more populist.” But nothing causes her more concern than changes in “Republican attitudes around foreign policy.”

“It was alarming in the focus groups to see so many Republican voters talk about Ukraine or [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in disparaging terms,” Longwell told the Washington Post.

The Omidyar connection

If Defending Democracy Together’s short history is any indication, the “Republicans for Ukraine” initiative may actually be powered by money from top supporters of the Democratic Party and the ultimate architect of the Ukraine war: President Joe Biden.

Defending Democracy Together was the top dark money spender in the 2020 election with its front, the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) leading the charge. By injecting more than $15 million dollars into the campaign, the outfit more than doubled the spending of the second-highest ranked dark money outfit. Its ads urged Republicans to vote for the Democrat, Joe Biden.

Since the outfit is powered by dark money, it is impossible to know who greases its wheels. However, disclosures by one NGO offer insight into the liberal leanings of its main known backer: tech mogul and US intelligence partner Pierre Omidyar, whose Democracy Fund distributed $4.15 million into Defending Democracy Together and its offshoot, Republicans for the Rule of Law, between 2018 and 2021.

As I reported with Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal, Omidyar has leveraged the fortune he amassed as the founder of Ebay to support establishment Democratic candidates while his various foundations act as cutouts for regime change operations waged by US intelligence, including in Ukraine. 

Defending Democracy Together serves as the sponsor for a mind-boggling array of important-sounding initiatives, all supposedly representative of the GOP: Republicans for Voting Rights, the Republican Accountability Project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, the Becoming American Initiative, The Russia Tweets, and now, Republicans for Ukraine.

Its first project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was introduced in a Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin, a neoconservative former George W. Bush cheerleader who switched parties during the Trump era. Rubin hailed the Kristol-led campaign for launching an effort to “protect [Robert] Mueller,” the FBI’s special counsel investigator who ultimately failed to turn up evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. The Republicans for the Rule of Law campaign pushed ads on Fox News and MSNBC touting Mueller’s Republican bonafides over footage of Marines firing off mortars in the jungles of Vietnam.

As calls to impeach President Donald Trump over his threats to withhold military aid to Ukraine reached a fever pitch in 2019, Republicans For The Rule of Law ran a million-dollar campaign to “run television ads on Fox and MSNBC, calling on Republicans to ‘demand the facts’ about Mr. Trump and Ukraine.” 

The name of Republicans For The Rule Of Law was tinged with an irony that is impossible to ignore: When US presidents have lied to the public to justify catastrophic military adventures and the sadistic torture of detainees, its founder demonstrated little interest in the rule of law. And today, the neocon guru may not even be a Republican at all.

By Thomas Harrington, Brownstone Institute, 9/1/23

In his marvelous Samba da Benção the Brazilian writer, singer, diplomat, and professional malandro Vinicius de Moraes speaks of the “art of the encounter” which, as the rest of the famous song-poem suggests, speaks to the essentially prayerful and therefore sacred nature of our attempts to understand each other, and the need to persist in the midst of life’s many tragedies and misunderstandings. It presumes, in other words, that there is unexplainable beauty and enchantment to be experienced, providing we can learn to be fully present in our encounters—including sad ones—with our fellow travelers. 

It’s not like Vinicius was inventing anything terribly new. The call to cultivate a state of expectant waiting in the midst of often sordid realities of life can be found, in one form or another, in all of the world’s major religious traditions. Indeed, it could be argued, and many have, that it is precisely the cultivation of the habit of stubborn hoping that separates us from the rest of the planet’s living creatures. 

Though I cannot be sure, I doubt the steers trudging toward their demise in the chutes at a stockyard are engaged in prayerfully remembering the beauty their eyes have taken in over the years or the internal warmth felt in the intimate communications with other bovines, or that they are hoping against hope that something approaching the sheer magic of those moments will once again visit them in this world or the next. Or that, conversely, they are obsessively contemplating the fate of what awaits them in the kill-house. 

But if, in fact, they did have this same cognitive and emotional tendencies, you can be sure that agricultural scientists, working for the ever smaller number of firms that control our food supply, would have used every genetic, behavioral, and pharmacological tool in their power to rid them of this way of being. 

After all, an angry steer is much more likely to act out in the chutes, thus putting a crimp on productivity, and from there, profit, the be-all and end-all of contemporary life. And all the cortisol in the system of the stressed and depressed ones probably does, as some have asserted, affect the quality of the meat. 

An important element of the practice of expectant waiting is presuming, at least initially, the essential goodwill of all with whom we share words and ideas in the course of our days. 

But of course, not everyone does come to encounters with others in a spirit of goodwill. In fact, many people often arrive at personal encounters with their minds set on extracting whatever material or spiritual good they can from the other person, and/or seeking the thrill certain of them seem to get from exercising one degree or another of control over that other’s life destiny. 

Again, there is little terribly novel in what I have just said. All of the great wisdom traditions have recognized the irretrievably dichotomous nature of the human being.

However, for reasons having to do with our relatively brief and fortunate history, and the fact that our collective was conceived, unlike those in most other places, within the relatively new paradigm of inexorable linear progress, Americans, it seems, have a harder time than most when it comes admitting the essentially coequal status of good and evil within the human heart. Unlike people from other cultures I have known, Americans seem to have a need to believe that human beings are more good than malevolent, and that somehow someway everything will work out well in the end. 

This lack of what Unamuno called the “tragic sense of life” was, up until a very short time ago, arguably our greatest asset as a people, and perhaps the prime source of the magnetism we’ve exercised over so much of the world during the last hundred or so years. 

But as times change, so must our assumptions about how the culture around us actually functions. If, in fact, we were ever truly the fresh-faced kid on the block sowing optimism and promoting justice around the world in anomalously generous quantities, that is clearly no longer the case. 

We are now a large and flailing empire whose elites, like the elites of all empires in decline, are seeking to desperately stave off the inevitable by barricading themselves (and as many of us as they can) inside the walls of their own propaganda edifice, and by bringing the same brutality they have used to tame distant others and steal their resources to bear on the great mass of their homeborn population. 

It is never fun to have to admit that someone or some social entity to which you have given your trust and your presumption of goodwill is not only manifestly incapable of reciprocating it, but is frankly bent on sacrificing your well-being and your dignity to its desperate attempts to cling to a few more months, years, or decades of obscene privilege. 

But that is where we are with our present government and the behemoth corporate entities with whom they now seamlessly cooperate in their desire to further control and exploit us. 

A minority of Americans, not surprisingly from the less favored classes where the brutality of day-to-day life tends to rob the elite’s non-stop happy-ending stories of their legs, has figured this out. And this is why they are systematically slandered in the media as frothing racists and violent extremists. 

The elite gambit here is to stigmatize such people so badly that no one on the cusp of perhaps accepting all or part of their grim but realistic social analysis will deign to go near them for fear of being seen as similarly tainted. Out of sight, the elites presume, out of mind. 

But that still leaves us with 65-70 percent of the population who are not quite ready to accept the reality of the intense disdain our predatory government and corporate elites have for them, and who still want to believe, in some measure, in the possibility of justice and dignity under the rules of the game as currently constituted. 

If the elite game with the openly pissed-off cohort of the population involves the forced disappearance of their social reality and their feelings of anguish, the one with this much larger and potentially more troublesome group revolves around the gradual anesthetization of their inherent desire to dream of better outcomes. 

And that is why they are doing everything in their power to discourage among us the age-old practice of looking into the eyes of others and listening mindfully to their take on the world, for they know that doing so forges bonds of empathy and links of complicity that have the potential to catalyze the creation of new social and political institutions more capable of sustaining our hopes of a more dignified life. 

I don’t know about you, but I never asked for “contact-free” service at restaurants and stores, or the ever-inefficient “efficiency” of online apps and bots rather than human beings when it comes to solving business and bureaucratic problems. Or being protected from the contamination possibilities of my fellow human beings through Plexiglas screens and useless, personality robbing masks. 

Rather, I have and always will seek contact-rich engagements with full face visibility and full vocal expression in all my social encounters because, like Vinicius, I understand the immense generative power of these things. 

I know that if I hadn’t been effectively forced into sometimes challenging engagements with widely varying people in crazily diverse social settings in these full-frontal ways I probably would have forever remained an only slightly less anxious version of the often timorous young adolescent I was.

And had I not grown in confidence through those experiences, I would never have gained my now enormous trust in the life-enriching power of serendipity; that is, how, if you give others the slightest opening for communication, you will find out surprising, if not near miraculous things about them and their life trajectories, stories that, like our dialogues with nature, tend to fill us with awe and enhance our trust in the power of human agency and resilience. 

Our current elites appear, unfortunately, to be more aware of all this than are most of us. 

And this is why they seek to mask our children, fill them with germophobic dread, and promote having them before screens filled with garbage content before they’ve ever has the chance to listen silently and without distraction to the birds as they wake up on a summer morning, or sit at a dinner table with people from different generations and different points of view, and learn about the inherent complexity, as well as the frequent hapless folly (great for learning tolerance!), of human relations. 

They want, in short, that our young never really become aware of the art of the encounter and the enormous power and suppleness it can bring to their lives. 

No, they want them incurious, history-less and feeling inert as they trudge along in the well laid-out chutes leading to the land of UBI and regularly scheduled injectable “enhancements” that will seamlessly insure that they can more efficiently serve the grand designs of those “experts” who, of course, understand better than they ever could the real reasons why each of them were put on this earth. 

And these hubristic social engineers will succeed in much of this unless the rest of us forcibly reclaim the art of the encounter in our own lives, and perhaps more importantly in our interactions with those in the generations following in our wake.

Thomas Harrington, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 8/30/23

The NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has been trending towards a stalemate since the beginning of the year after Moscow’s growing edge in the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” ensured that it won’t be defeated. NATO is unlikely to be defeated either, however, since it’ll probably intervene directly – whether as a whole or via a Polish–led mission that draws in the bloc via Article 5 – to freeze the Line of Contact in the event that Russia achieves a breakthrough and threatens to sweep through Ukraine. 

The counteroffensive’s spectacular failure and the subsequently vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine strongly suggest that talks with Russia will resume by year’s end for freezing the conflict. Ahead of that happening, these wartime allies are frenziedly trying to convince their respective people that the other is responsible for this debacle simultaneously with formulating an attractive post-conflict vision of the future. The first is served by their vicious blame game while the second will now be discussed.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s now polling third after winning last week’s debate and had earlier attracted enormous media attention for his outspokenness on sensitive issues, just published his “Viable Realism & Revival Doctrine” in an article for The American Conservative. Of relevance to this piece is his plan for ending the NATO-Russian proxy war. Liberal–globalist policymakers and their media allies responded with fury, and it’s not difficult to see why.

Ramaswamy describes the conflict as a “no-win war” that’s needlessly depleted Western stockpiles to China’s benefit. With a view towards more effectively containing the People’s Republic in the Asia-Pacific, he therefore suggests extricating the US from its proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. To that end, he proposes recognizing the new ground realities in Eastern Europe, ending NATO expansion, refusing to admit Ukraine to the bloc, lifting sanctions, and having Europe shoulder the burden for its own security.

The explicit goal is to “get Putin to dump Xi”, and that’s why he says that the quid pro quo is “Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” Ramaswamy is convinced that his plan will “elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia” if it’s implemented into practice, but the problem is that no such “military alliance” exists between those two. Moreover, it’s unrealistic to imagine that the US will “get Putin to dump Xi” since they’re good friends and their countries are strategic partners.

Having said clarified that, this plan does have its merits. From the Russian side, it ensures that country’s objective national security interests and gives it the chance to rely on the EU for preemptively averting potentially disproportionate economic dependence on China upon the lifting of sanctions. On the home front, Ramaswamy’s plan appeals to the pragmatic policymaking faction whose influence is on the rise as proven by the success over the summer of their policy towards India that was detailed here.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The US is looking for a “face-saving” way to resume peace talks like was previously explained, and the rising influence of pragmatic policymakers could lead to them overruling the liberal-globalists’ objections to this, though their rivals could still try to sabotage this. The enormous media attention that Ramaswamy has already generated, not to mention what he’s now receiving as a result of his proposal, could reshape the national discourse on the proxy war’s endgame.

Americans are becoming fatigued with this conflict but no one had yet articulated an attractive post-conflict vision of the future until now. Irrespective of Ramaswamy’s political future, his plan serves to spark a wider conversation at all levels about the pragmatism of compromising with Russia in order to free the US up for more effectively containing China in the Asia-Pacific. This can in turn facilitate the resumption of talks with Russia, especially if it emboldens pragmatic US policymakers.

The vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine over the counteroffensive’s failure leads to the inevitable one over who’s responsible for losing this proxy war, with all of this preceding America’s formulation of an attractive post-conflict vision of the future for its people and policymakers alike. The first dynamic is continually intensifying and making more headlines by the day, while the second is also presently unfolding but mostly in silence, and it’s this dynamic that Ramaswamy’s plan contributes to.

Accepting the impossibility of Russia abandoning its mutually beneficial cooperation with China and acknowledging that lifting the sanctions likely won’t happen either, the rest of his proposals could form the parameters of a potential Russian-American deal for ending their proxy war in Ukraine. That former Soviet Republic wouldn’t join NATO, nor would that bloc expand any further, and the West would de facto recognize the new ground realities in Eastern Europe while the EU bears the burden for its security.

Russia would obviously have to agree to some regional compromises too in that scenario, such as Ukraine’s privileged post-conflict relationship with NATO and the hard security guarantees that the Anglo-American Axis will likely provide, but these could be acceptable if its other interests are met. If there’s any movement in this direction, then it shouldn’t be maliciously spun as Russia conspiring to facilitating the US’ containment of China, but seen for what it truly is: Russia putting its interests first.

The Bell, 9/1/23

What’s wrong with using the yuan and the rupee?

The U.S. dollar and euro were used to pay for 30% of Russian exports in July (compared to 87% before the war). On the one hand, by continuing to trade in euros or U.S. dollars, Russian companies make themselves more vulnerable to Western sanctions. On the other hand, switching to the rupee or the yuan is far from ideal due to problems with conversion, risk management and capital flow.

The problems with using rupees to buy Russian crude are a classic example. After the European oil embargo, India became the biggest buyer of Russian oil. That led to a radical imbalance in trade between the countries: in the first half of 2023, Russian exports to India were worth $30 billion, while imports were just $7 billion. Russian exporters are paid in Indian rupees, which is only partially convertible and literally has nowhere to go — at the moment, most of the money is just sitting in Indian banks. Many believe this was a major reason for the ruble’s collapse over the summer. Others feel the “rupee problem” is overstated. Either way, it is a direct consequence of the de-dollarized Russian economy.

The myth of the single BRICS currency

One solution to this problem is the Holy Grail of anti-Americanism — the introduction of a single currency for the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. However, most believe that, even as this geopolitical club expands, a single currency is either an impossible dream or an expensive political sleight-of-hand.

Last week’s BRICS summit was interesting not so much because of what happened (offering membership of the group to Iran and Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopia and Egypt) but what didn’t. There was a total absence of any discussion of the previously-announced BRICS single currency.

Politicians in all BRICS countries have long talked about a single currency — although there has been little action. The idea is particularly popular among more anti-Western countries, who regard the U.S. dollar, euro and other Western currencies as instruments of neo-colonialism, or a means of inflating financial bubbles. 

Putin said last year that BRICS countries were discussing the creation of an international reserve currency. Brazil’s president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has also spoken in favor of the idea. South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor in January backed the creation of a single currency to finance projects between member countries and reduce dependence on Western currencies. In March, a nationalist member of the Russian parliament, Alexander Babakov, even went as far as to say that BRICS would print its own currency backed by land and rare metals. The U.S. dollar and the euro, he claimed, “are not backed by anything.”

What would such a single currency look like?

At one end of the spectrum, we have a true single currency like the Euro. But this cannot be replicated. There is no free movement of capital between BRICS countries since the authorities in Russia, China and India all restrict cross-border currency operations to varying degrees and their currencies are only partially convertible. There is also no free movement of labor between these countries. More importantly, the BRICS countries — apart from India — are on synchronized economic cycles that are driven by China’s demand for raw materials. And, while inflation in China is stable, in other countries it is not — which means the Central Banks cannot synchronize monetary policies. Any political decision to introduce a single currency would cost China dear.

A more realistic possibility is a synthetic unit, like the European Currency Unit (a precursor to the Euro). A closer parallel might be the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR). Much like the SDR when it was created in 1969, a BRICS unit of account could be based on a basket of currencies from participating countries. It could then be used to settle accounts instead of the U.S. dollar, euro, yuan or ruble.

Theoretically, it would be possible to introduce a specific unit of account that is not backed by anything, and use it to get away from pricing in U.S. dollars. But this does nothing to encourage de-dollarization — and, ultimately, is more or less the same as bartering.

What are the obstacles?

The major problem is political. India is unlikely to agree to a single currency that would be dominated by China, the largest BRICS economy (up to now, India has striven to contain its powerful neighbor). Russia would benefit from a BRICS currency, since it would gain access to a new reserve currency at a time when sanctions are boxing it in. But the other BRICS members do not have this problem, so the benefits for them would be minimal.

Another problem lies within the trade structures of BRICS. India and South Africa run a trade deficit, and using a single reserve unit would deplete their own reserves unless they could ensure a flow of revenues from outside. For Russia, that would be helpful in its current circumstances, but it would be hard to get its partners to agree.

And there is a final significant problem. Exporters in countries outside Russia that are not affected by sanctions can happily receive U.S. dollars or euros and exchange them for their national currencies. A new unit of account would require a newly-created market where the Central Banks of the BRICS countries would inject liquidity by buying and selling the new unit — while remaining unable to carry out emissions.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/31/23

In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was 82%, according to the last available Levada centre poll.

Despite the speculation that the Russians might rise up and rebel following the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity remains higher than ever according to Levada.

Putin’s popularity had been hovering in the mid- to high-60s for much of the pandemic years, falling to a one-time low of 53 points in April 2020 when the first lockdowns were introduced before recovering to 66 in August that year.

However, following the invasion of Ukraine his popularity leaped over 10 points to 83 in March 2022 and has remained at between 81 and 83 points throughout the duration of the war, with the exception of September to November when it fell to 77-79 following Ukraine’s successful Kharkiv counter-offensive.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has also enjoyed a bump in popularity, with his approval rating rising from the mid-50s pre-war to 69-71% since the start of this year. His approval was slightly down to 69% in July.

Mishustin’s government has also been lifted from around 50% approval pre-war to 67% in July and has consistently polled at 67-69% all year.

Russia’s regional governors are even more popular, as they have in the last ten years become more effective and have concerned themselves with dealing with the immediate needs of their constituents. Region governors received consistent ratings of between the high-50s to low-60s pre-war that rose to 69% following the start of the war and have stayed at 69-74 in since. In July their approval fell slightly to a still high 72%.

The Duma remains the most unpopular institution in Russia but even that has had a boost from the nationalist rhetoric and heavy-handed propaganda. Pre-war the majority of Russian disapproved of the Duma with a roughly 40%/50% approve/disapprove split.

However, that ratio flipped in March 2022 to a 59/36 approval/disapproval as the majority of Russians approved of the Duma and its actions. Since then the overall majority of Russians still approve of the Duma with the rate varying at 54-59, and the split was 57/35 approve/disapprove in July, the last data available, with the remainder expressing no view.

The surge in nationalism is also visible in Levada’s “which direction is the country going in?” poll. Pre-war around 50% of respondents thought the country was going in the “right” direction, with roughly 44% believing it was going in the “wrong” direction and the remainder having no opinion.

However, following the start of the war the number of respondents saying Russia was going in the “right” direction jumped to 69% in March 2022 and wrong fell to 22%.

Since then respondents have very consistently polled at 67-68% for the right direction, with a few aberrations, such as the months of the Kharkiv offensive disaster for Russia.

Those that think Russia is going in the wrong direction are consistently down 20 percentage points at around 22% compared to the pre-war period, while the “don’t know” category has remained the same, circa 10% for both pre-war and post-start of the war periods.

As for the propensity to protest with political demands, this has roughly halved between the pre- and post-start of the war periods. This metric is a little more volatile than the political approval results, but the propensity to protest with political demands has oscillated around 27-30% for most of the last five years, but it fell sharply in the first poll after the start of the war in May 2022 to 16% and was 17% in July.

Interestingly, the accompanying question of “could there be political protests and would you participate if there were?” has fallen even further. Pre-war the poll found somewhere between 19% and 29% said yes to this second question, but in May 2022 that fell to only 6%, its lowest level in years. Since then it has recovered to 15% in July, which is on par with many of the polls in the pre-war period.

The political protest questions suggest that immediately after the war started respondents were afraid to take to the streets because of the anticipated Kremlin crackdown. However, after the initial shock of the invasion wore off a small minority of around 15% remain opposed to the Putin regime and war has not added significantly to their numbers. The same people don’t like Putin now as didn’t like him before the war.

The propensity to protest with economic demands show almost identical patterns. Pre-war those that thought protests were possible numbered 25-30% with 21-29% saying they would participate if protests happened.

In the May 2022 poll that fell to 17% that thought protests could happen and 14% saying they would participate if they did. In July the same 17% said protests could happen but the number willing to participate has fallen to 10%.