This is backed by almost all quantitative and qualitative research conducted over past ~35 years.
I would require some data from a person who likely wouldn’t say the same about countries backing Turkey (and by extension Azerbaijan) and Israel.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680221108328 https://meduza.io/feature/2024/06/25/a-kogda-uzhe-pobeda-to-nasha-budet https://www.jiia.or.jp/en/column/2022/09/russia-fy2022-01.html
I specially provided a selection of lesser know research to avoid the usual arguments about “but how can you do polling in a totalitarian state”.
Turns out, you can. And the findings show that preference falsification (e.g. a russian saying that they support the invasion of Ukraine, when they really don’t) is minor and does not change the real picture; that at the very least a strong majority of russians are genocidal imperialists.
I didn’t say a lot of people don’t support it. But that’d be in parity with a lot of Americans supporting invasion of Iraq or Israel’s crimes. Which makes them similar genocidal imperialists. So genocidal imperialism is normal in your “civilized world”, you are doing it.
That injustice would be responsible, by the way, for a certain percentage of people answering something not because they support the war, but because they hate all those virtue-signaling jerks who support many other wars which go unpunished, with those jerks also residing in states where their political position doesn’t cost them fines or jail. I don’t like hypocrisy as well.
And it’s funny, another guy just talked about “apathetic stance”, and you now talk about “totalitarian state”, and both are used to blame Russians, while they are mutually contradictory. If a state is totalitarian, then any stance taken without a suicide belt (and most taken with it) doesn’t give you any immediate results. And it is.
I’m not going to argue that the majority of neurotypical people will support a war their state starts. If you are from the USA, yours did with much bigger euphoria than Russians in 2022.
This is pretty tired whataboutism w.r.t US and Iraq.
The Iraq equivalent would be American annexing Basra state, banned arabic and forcing everyone to speak with a Texan accent and eat pork chops.
All the while sending Arabic speaker to dungeons and having state TV with goons laughing about how they caught a local Iraq women speaking Arabic and sent her to a dungeon.
