You have to understand that ordinary people in Russia are scared out of their minds. On the first day of the conflict, almost 1,000 protesters were jailed across Russia for walking outside with as little as a piece of paper that said: “I don’t want war.” According to the independent media source OVD-info, in the first four days of the war more than 5,200 people were arrested.
My friend spent time in jail for walking down the same street as the protesters. A professor of sociology, Grigory Yudin, was arrested in the centre of Moscow and reportedly beaten up in the back of an autozak (police bus).
There are now more police teams than I can count – with new names such as Rosgvardiya (Russia’s internal military force) – and they are ruthless. These forces were created several years ago specifically to wander the streets of Moscow (and other cities) and prevent anything “suspicious” from happening.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an 18-year-old kid or a pregnant middle-aged woman, they’ll beat you up, put you in a wagon and take you in for questioning. When you have a former KGB agent in charge, you have a country that functions as an enormous jail.
It is painfully clear to us that this war is absolutely pointless. Putin is using false history lessons, lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union, and making claims about Nato advancing its forces simply to justify his own madness. I believe that the true answer to the question people ask on social media – “how did we get to this?” – is that Putin is insane.





















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