That is the only opinion that's safe to say in the public though, isn't it? So even if that's the only thing heard, it's not clear what the share of the public agreeing with this sentiment is. To my understanding even in Soviet days the people who never had had free media available to them still had a pretty good idea about the dependability of the information provided.
Exactly this. I'd be much more interested in what people say anonymously. Same story anytime you see a North Korean being interviewed with their face visible.
Such a reaction is within expectations — of course there will be resentment, because the tangible consequences of economic hardship on this scale are devastating.
I'd expect such sentiments to continue and amplify over time — but hopefully support for the war will also be driven down in parallel. Even if it's considered a tactical blunder ("we can't afford to keep up this special operation") rather than a moral one.
It seems it depends which generation we're talking about. Younger Russians seems to be the ones most connected and thus aware of what's going on abroad, while middle aged Russians are playing the ostrich and burying their head in the sand. I saw an interview yesterday of a journalist wanting to show 50-something Russian people what's going on in Ukraine, and most of them were like "I don't want to see, get that thing away from me. It's bullshit, that's not what the news has been saying at all. I stand with Putin."
I saw that as well and it was interesting, but unfortunately that style of video (man on the street aka vox populi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_populi) is notorious for "seeming" like its an accurate and balanced survey / measure of public sentiment to a viewer while its still just as editable/influenced by the journalists subconscious or conscious editorial bias as any other form of journalism or propaganda.
I, possibly, saw the same thing. I thought it was fascinating. The 50-somethings mostly following the party line. The 20-something was pretty clearly anti-war and anti-Putin. The 30-something said with a wry smile, "I don't want to talk about it because that is dangerous, here, you know." And my favourite, the 70-something saying, "It is awful. We have lost 500 already [the officially admitted death toll], and for what? We don't know!"
They gonna send nukes because IKEA stopped sending Billy?
I'm not sure Billy will come back that way.
Let's face it: Russia is illegaly invading a foreign country that is fighting back hard. The only way I see out for Russia to save itself is by sending Putin into exile and blame it all on him.
Putin hoped for weakness in the west re sanctions and weapons. They play hardball and now Putin is failing.
edit: I also believe nuclear is the only war Russia could even think about against the west. The army isn't that strong obviously...
It is really a bad situation because NOBODY in the west has thought about attacking Russia at all. It is all in their heads. It's just plain stupid.
I agree with some of your points, but what do you mean by "strong"? Ukraine is not a cake walk, and the most powerful armies in the world could barely contain poor Afghani warlords. This is not easy.
Consider that much of the news of Russian failure is an information op. The Ukrainians are putting up a valiant fight, but the Russians will run them over without support, no doubt about it.
Russia is supposedly a superpower with modern equipment. But their material leaks oil, tyres are in terrible condition food is missing, their logistics don't work out, they have no air superiority, they don't even have secure communication. At this point I'd be surprised if that huge convoy will reach Kiyv within the next week or at all...
It shows that you cannot support a huge army in such a poor country (GDP/capita). There was a myth to the russian army, but they barely manage to capture cities in which (according to propaganda) most inhabitans support them.
They wanted a Blitzkrieg and it didn't work out at all. Of course they can keep throwing material and bombs at the cities. They have much more material. But how quickly can they do that? Can they cut off supplies from western countries? Can they keep fighting against Javelins and ambushes?
What's the end game at this point? They will be hated by the population they supposedly wanted to free, the cities will be destroyed and they became an international pariah. Their economy will be in shambles.
Russia did think it would be easy ("will be greeted with flowers and bread")!
>Russia is supposedly a superpower with modern equipment. But their material leaks oil, tyres are in terrible condition food is missing, their logistics don't work out, they have no air superiority, they don't even have secure communication.
I'm having trouble reconciling the above sentences. The equipment they have is the equipment they have, it wasn't a mystery to military analysts or the intelligence community, by any means. That doesn't make their military "weak" any more than it makes the American military "weak" for their results in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Reading through the comments in this thread, I wonder how many people think we're getting unbiased analysis of what's happening over there. Do people really think the Russians are completely flailing here? I have a hard time believing it, myself, but I'm no expert.
No doubt about it? That's just as much an "information op" as the other side you claim. This war is far from decided and making such baseless claims as Russia steamrolling Ukraine because you've heard somewhere of Russia's fearsome military is irresponsible at best.
>No doubt about it? That's just as much an "information op" as the other side you claim.
I guess we'll see, and revisit this comment in the future. Personally, I find it funny that people like yourself don't believe the Russian military is superior to that of the Ukraine after watching a week of YouTube videos.
>heard somewhere of Russia's fearsome military is irresponsible at best.
Russia doesn't need to save itself, it's not under any existential threat. Sanctions will hurt, but they'll live. The ordinary people will suffer worst, and the elite will have to make do without holidays in France and Italian marble counter tops, but their positions depend on maintaining the oppressive state system.
That sounds reasonable, but I wonder what the real elite-government interaction will be like soon. Oligarchs prop up what the government was doing in exchange for government not bothering them. If there's enough economic impact that they can't be the sponsors of Putin... that agreement may fail.
I wonder how the Russian population would feel about Putin using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine if it looks like Russia is losing. Are they that far gone, that inhuman? If they are, what do you do about a country like that, who feels that nuking neighbors after your attempt to conquer them fails is justified? I don't believe the Russian people are that far gone.
I don't think dropping nukes on Ukraine is something Russia would even consider. It makes absolutely no sense from their perspective.
What I fear is a Cuba crisis style standoff where Russia sets an ultimatum demanding the West stop all arms deliveries to Ukrainian forces, threatening any transit countries (such as Poland) with nukes.
>threatening any transit countries (such as Poland) with nukes
They can threat all they want, but Poland is a NATO member. An attack on Poland will trigger a retaliation from NATO. Not sure Russia wishes to go to war with all of NATO.
It's not a popular take, but the USSR spawned lots of nationalism in its republics. Soviet ideology held that nationalism is good, and that it would flourish under socialism for the benefit of its "peoples". The reality is that nationalism ended up eating the USSR itself. Nationalism is never good, we are only one humanity, not many
You might direct your questions at your ISP instead as it appears that someone may be intercepting your DNS requests.
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To elaborate a bit, the differences in the (74.125.x.x) IP addresses being returned is somewhat normal and would usually be attributed to simple load balancing (as d33 pointed out). That is, 8.8.8.8 is actually a load balancer with several servers (including 74.125.46.8, 74.125.46.11, and 74.125.74.3) behind it.
The differences seen in the returned "edns0-client-subnet", however, are, well, "interesting".
As you've directed the requests to 8.8.8.8 directly (as opposed to your system's default resolver, whatever that is), the response returned for "edns0-client-subnet" should normally either be your own IP address or a supernet that includes it. (In my case, for example, the value is the static IP address (/32) of my own resolver.) When sending multiple requests such as you have, the "edns0-client-subnet" shouldn't really be changing from one request/response to the next; at the least, the values shouldn't change this much.
The fact that the responses are changing would seem to indicate that Google DNS servers are receiving the requests from different IP addresses when they should, in fact, all be coming from the same IP address (yours). These changes would lead me to suspect that someone (i.e., your ISP) is intercepting your DNS requests and "transparently proxying" them on your behalf.
If your ISP is using CGNAT (and issues you a private IP address) or something similar, that might explain it. Otherwise, I would be suspicious.
If you run those commands without the +short you will see that the TTL values for those responses are less than 59 (which for Google Public DNS, indicates they are cached, and explaining why the IP addresses shown are not yours).
The o-o.myaddr.l.google.com domain is a feature of Google's authoritative name servers (ns[14].google.com) and not of 8.8.8.8. You can send similar queries through 1.1.1.1 (where you will see that there is no EDNS Client Subnet data provided, improving the privacy of your DNS but potentially returning less accurate answers, as Google's authoritative servers do not have your IP subnet, but only the IP address of the CloudFlare resolver forwarding your query.
