> I disagree with sanctioning and punishing ordinary citizens for the actions of the rich and powerful 1%.
... I no longer buy this. The war is, unfortunately, very popular with ordinary Russians. And I hope you don't have any illusions that the citizens sincerely support their dear leader Putin.
I don't know what would convince you, but if you're American I will assume that you can't read Russian. So for an English source look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_2022_Russ... which is far from unbiased source, but it has a good list of references. So far the anti-war protests gathered barely a couple of thousand of people across the whole country. Even if you multiply those numbers times 10 (because people are afraid of police), and then by another factor of 10 (because official numbers may lie) you will still get a negligible number like 0.01% of the population.
At the same time Berlin alone has had 100k+ people on the streets.
But if you can read Russian, then just take a peek at pikabu.ru and d3.ru (which are like reddit in Russia) or any popular livejournal accounts. You will find too many anti-ukrainian sentiments describing us all as literal nazis [1].
Our soldiers are also finding smartphones of dead Russian soldiers and there has been quite a few photos of their communication back home ( https://i.imgur.com/1OZXgfw.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/oXUL2FJ.jpeg ). The first photo is his communication with his sister where she's asking about the war and "hohols" (derogatory term for Ukrainians), the second photo is his communication with his "beloved girlfriend" where the girlfriend asks to show no mercy to "them", "them" being hohols ... errr ... Ukrainians, I presume, because we, allegedly, would show no mercy to them; which is ironic because if you guys could just fuck off back home it would be really swell.
[1] calling Ukrainians nazis is a fucking bullshit -- our president is jewish, who got elected in an actual election by 73% of the country. Oh yeah, and the runner up candidate (ex-president) is also jewish. And yes, we, unlike Russia, did in fact have an actual elections. If Russians are so against nazis then why the fuck Russian PMC (private military corporation) Wagner is involved here (on the Russian side, of course) whose commander is this fucking asshole with an actual nazi insignia: https://newlinesmag.com/wp-content/uploads/utkin-tattoos.jpg ( from this article https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-wagner-group-files/ )?!
At this point I believe that Russia is pretty much North Korea -- their rulers have such a tight grip on their citizens that the citizens are now truly brainwashed into thinking that their dear leader is God incarnate and that the rest of the world is indeed out to get them.
I am Ukrainian living in Kyiv. On 24th of February I woke up from the sounds of rockets bombing the shit of my city. I've been a programmer since as long as I can remember myself, but now I'm making Molotov's to help repel the invaders because I'm now 100% sure that I will be "cleansed" on some trumped-up charges of being a nazi in case Russia does indeed take over Ukraine. And cleansed here means imprisoned or killed, and I'm not being dramatic here, this is the exact term used by Russia as one of their explicit stated goal of this so called "special operation". The best I can hope for is that I'll have few more years to live until I'll be used as a cannon fodder in some other bullshit war Russia starts.
This war is literally an existential threat to me. And from the looks of it, majority of Russians actually support it.
