Why more and more Russians are backing the war

O, do the Russians long for war? Ask of the stillness evermore, Ask of the field, or ask the breeze, And ask the birch and poplar trees.

So begins a famous Soviet-era song and poem, written by Yevgenii Yevtushenko during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Volodymyr Zelensky cited the poem in his eve-of-war address to Russians, hoping it would rekindle these pacifistic sentiments and encourage resistance against the Kremlin’s imminent invasion.

Apart from a relatively few (very) brave souls, Russians did not rise up. Opinion polls in authoritarian states must be treated carefully, but the absence of large-scale protests, combined with polls suggesting that 71 to 81 per cent of Russians approve of military activity in Ukraine, provide a fairly definitive answer to the question posed in Yevtushenko’s poem: yes, the Russians do want war.

But this tragic and unappealing answer immediately raises another more nuanced question: how much do Russians want war? And at what cost?

In August last year, just six months prior to the invasion, two-thirds of Russians rated higher living standards as more important than great power status or ambitions. It gave rise to hopes that sanctions would curb Russian appetites for war, especially when combined with a mounting death toll.

Some have argued that support for the war must be superficial. The Kremlin’s pro-war events appear staged, like the obscene warfest at Luzhniki stadium last month, where pop singers and politicians adorned with the pro-war symbol Z entertained an unenthusiastic audience of tens of thousands of people bussed in for the occasion.

But these arguments misunderstand Russian society today and how Putin’s regime functions. The Kremlin’s political messaging instrumentalises trauma to impose and ensure political apathy – hence Putin and his close advisers’ invocation of Stalinist language, of the chaotic criminality of the 1990s and the ever-constant threat of Nazism at Russia’s gates.