Not only is there mounting evidence that Russians didn’t think Putin would actually invade Russia, but that Putin is actively trying to censor obvious words used to criticize his failures.

Since March 4, 2022, censorship has been introduced in Russia : for anti-war statements, you can get up to 15 years in prison. It is also forbidden to call a war a war.

On March 10-13, we conducted a nationwide telephone survey, in which 1811 respondents took part (full data is available in the public domain). What did we see?

Respondents increasingly refuse to answer direct questions and give their place of residence, explaining that they do not want to go to prison.

This means that opinion polls no longer reflect real opinions. But thanks to them, you can find out the degree of intimidation of the respondents.

A country was called not a country and now it has become even more impossible to discuss Ukraine publicly in Russia because it now is a crime to call a war a war.

Much of the analysis I have seen so far about this misses the three points that (1) the Russians didn’t think Putin was so stupid he would go to war with Russia (given Putin claimed forever that Ukraine wasn’t a thing), (2) that Putin is necessarily surrounded by sycophants and incompetence (due to corruption and fraud inextricable from dictatorships that centralize power), and (3) that Russians aren’t happy about it, especially as their country looks more and more like Venezuela, but have limited methods or means for opposition.

More to the point perhaps is that Russian military intelligence has clumsily been trying to position a war they started as something right out of a white supremacist meme.

They want people to believe that Russia is a victim and its invasion of a neighboring state was “forced” upon them. This is similar to “pre-emptive” thinking of Nazi Germany, which allowed Hitler to advocate invasion of neighboring countries to stop a future attack that was completely fictionalized.

Also they want people believe that Russia is on a mission to destroy the “world-order” that is conspiring against them. This is similar to the racist thinking of Nazi Germany, which emboldened Hitler to perpetrate war crimes and genocide.

These two memes are variations of the theme that Russia is ready to go to extreme measures and ignore boundaries because it is “preserving” something and so fearful it must act out of desperation.

A counter-message narrative that comes from inside Russia thus has to be exceptionally careful to acknowledge the closed minds, closed borders of an insecure and fearful state.

Not only can broad swaths of messages be criminalized by Russia, as if it’s 1830s America trying to stop abolition of slavery, it might also have a problem of friendly-fire.
Recently I wrote about “protestware” so incredibly stupid that it blindly targeted Russian systems based on IP address alone and destroyed their files. In doing so, such un-intelligent acts of malice are likely to destroy systems necessary to help Russians trying to speak out against Russian abuses of power.

Rolling Stone has a detailed report on how America pressed forward confidently on chemical weapons cleanup after getting blank stares from their Russian counterparts.

In Geneva, as the team supporting Kerry was hammering out the details, it seemed like Russia had already lost interest in the endeavor. “We give them a piece of paper that says what we think the plan should be, and they just go, ‘Yeah, that looks fine to us,’ ” Cinnamon, who’d flown to Europe to aid negotiations, recalls. “They didn’t even look at it. They’re like, ‘I don’t care. You guys are going to fail. Write whatever you want.’ We kind of look at each other like, ‘Well, if we can write whatever we want, then . . . let’s just go for -everything.’ ”

This was perceived as indifference or apathy at the time because Americans vastly over-estimated the competence of Russian officials. The reason “they didn’t even look at it” and were like “don’t care” or “you guys are going to fail” is actually explained by basic incompetence of the Russian dictatorship.

It would be like showing the same things to someone in the Trump family.

Perhaps most interesting is that this amazing security operations success story both gives foreshadowing of Russian incompetence during the invasion of Ukraine, and also is done in a very modest context. The architects even say it would be awkward to boast about it while other work needs to be done. The best operators do not talk loudly about American operations.