No, not what you think.

Ukrainian attitudes toward average Russians

Ruptured for a generation. Ukrainians don't much distinguish now between average Russians and their government,

quote:

The people we watched crawl out of the rubble today told us their relatives in Moscow didn't believe them. Videos of their destroyed home were met with 'it's a fake' or 'Nazis did it.' *Every* bond between Ukrainians & Russians - familial, cultural, historical - is being broken.

One wonders how long before individual Ukrainians, or organized groups, begin to launch terror attacks in Russian cities. It's so easy for them to mingle unnoticed until they strike.

Bernice, the Lithuanian caregiver who took care of my mom for a while, had recently been caring for a Ukrainian lady. She said that her client gets all of her news from Russian sources and that she refuses to believe anything her daughter, who lives in Ukraine, says about what is going on.

Bernice is in her early 70s and had been talking about retiring in the near future. She pulled the trigger a couple of weeks ago and told her client she was quitting. She said she couldn't take the Russian propaganda playing all day and her client bashing the Ukrainians. The (clueless) woman asked her if she might come back after things were over in Ukraine.

It's a lesson for everyone. Access to quality information is critical.....

Access to accurate information and willingness to engage with that information openly and without falling back on the soft temptations of personal bias are two different things. I suspect this goes much deeper than "Russia controls the flow of information." Witness the Americans who bobble their heads at everything Dobbs, Hannity, and Carlson spew out. If you don't want to think about the world in other than black and white, you don't have to.

People in Russia used to pass Samizdat by hand until it was unreadable. But the masses now are content, seemingly, to receive the Kremlin's pap because they have a slightly higher standard of living now than in 1990. May that standard of living soon fall well below 1990. Yes, "ordinary Russians" must be made to feel real economic pain. Severe hardship for many.

But we should also worry about Ukrainians cheerfully taking terror directly to these ordinary people. Russia's wholesale leveling of cities, and its calculated attacks on civilian infrastructure mean that ordinary Ukrainians aren't likely to feel much remorse if schools, hospitals, and shopping malls are shot up or blown up in Russia.

It in almost unbelievable that Putin et al could not foresee all the terrible fallout of this invasion. Delusion.

This is a standard failing of extreme autocracies. Who is willing to tell Putin that he is wrong? Autocracies have notoriously poor information available for decision making.

Witness the recent arrests of top FSB officers for their supposed "failings" in advising Putin. The war between the spies and the military doesn't bode well for Russia.

Russian Spy Boss Detained