Russia to Hire Contract Soldiers in Bid to Avoid Unpopular Draft. Russia is preparing to enlist more contract soldiers as it presses its invasion of Ukraine, aiming to avoid at least for now another mass call-up that could undermine popular support for the war
This baffles me
It shouldn’t. Russia controls all of its media. To Russians, Putin is fighting a war to free their ancestral homeland from Nazis.
Russians aren’t all just nice people fooled by state media, either. They have their own version of MAGAt over there, and those dudes are saying “Ukraine is ours historically. The west can go fuck the selves if they don’t like it.”
This allows them to feel simultaneously strong in their local sphere and relevant on the world stage. These feelings are desperately needed by complete assholes who have almost nothing good about themselves or their country to point to.
Not only its own media, but almost all russian language media throughout the world is monitored and controlled by the russian government. If the only language you know is russian, it’s very hard to get unbiased information.
I am sure you have very credible sources for this conspiracy theory, because as opposed to those stupid Russians, you know English and are capable of critical thinking, so this isn’t just something you’ve heard from totally different and very honest media and accepted to be true, so would you be so kind to share them?
Definitely, after all, it’s a known fact that the most popular western social platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, Discord, Instagram and previously Twitter are very open and never ban people for speaking out things that don’t agree with the current narration, as opposed to Telegram for example (where a lot of russian-speaking people communicate and get their news from), which is known to ban people based on politics. Or wait, is it actually the other way around?..
Also older generations that lived through the 90s know what a collapse of the Russian state means. For them it is a terrifying thought to have to live through that … again.
To top that off, It is not as if they have any alternatives. Even Navalny was a right wing scumbag who though Crimea belonged to russia … and he was considered the good guy.
At this point it’s pretty obvious that all you need to make something popular is to have all the media repeat it in unison. Works great on our people as well.