Hopefully the moderators will make a special wartime exception and allow me to link to a *NN article by Nic Robertson. I think it speaks to what it is like on the streets in Russia.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/11/europe/l ... index.html
A few interesting quotes.
Over the past couple of months while I've been reporting from Moscow, I've met many people who have been horrified, shocked and numbed by Putin's wanton aggression. Some of them believed him when he said he wouldn't invade Ukraine. Some even knew players in the Kremlin inner circle and thought they understood the President's red lines, but now that trust is blown and they fear he has no limits at all.
What makes Putin's actions all the more galling is how he executed his plot in plain sight. Distracting with one hand, transfixing attention on diplomacy, even while insisting falsely that his massed troops were carrying out exercises on Ukraine's borders.
In recent days Moscow's clogged arteries have pulsed to flashing blue lights of police vehicles of every size and shape, from lowly traffic cops to lumbering trucks loaded with recently arrested protesters, their strident sirens insisting other traffic yield to them as they blast their way through.
As more Ukrainian cities crumbled under Russian bombardment, at home riot-ready cops enforced Putin's Orwellian writ to crush any sympathy for their neighbors. Across Russia, more than 1,000 protesters a day were arrested during the first week of the war.
We watched as young and old alike, men and women were body-slammed, arms bent excruciatingly behind backs, faces slammed on floors, legs kicked apart by a well-trained, well-paid, menacing human machine. A branch of the state has been grown for this purpose, and it is now being wielded unflinchingly.
Putin has shaped the Russian state entirely in his image, a move that will not be easily righted. The majority are cowed, the complicit in too deep to reverse their actions, his sanctioned cronies warned to swallow their anger and take the losses for the team like true patriots.
On side streets away from the riot police, anti-war protesters choked back their feelings as they told us their agonies, of "loving Russia," "hating Putin" and torn about wanting to be "anywhere" but here.
Part of the pain of seeing all this is knowing that so much of Russia's vast wealth of intellect and resources lies untapped. Meanwhile, one man and his cronies is destroying the country.
How should Russia have tried to get these concessions?