Russians Protest Vladimir Putin's Invasion Of Ukraine As Tensions Rise

Feelings Drama

Watch Russians Protest Vladimir Putin's Invasion Of Ukraine As Tensions Rise - Feelings Drama on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Russia is attacking hospitals, mobile aid brigades and ambulances.

00:07This is the action of a state determined to kill civilians.

00:11There is no debate. These are war crimes.

00:16As the global community condemns Russia's leaders,

00:19Western sanctions are wreaking havoc on its citizens.

00:22The value of the ruble dropped 30% in a fortnight.

00:25It's now worth less than one cent US.

00:27Interest rates have now more than doubled to 20%.

00:31As ordinary Russians scramble to withdraw savings,

00:34cash is in desperately short supply.

00:37Since Thursday, everyone has been running between ATMs to withdraw cash.

00:42Some get lucky, some don't.

00:44It is not clear how we would be buying groceries and other stuff

00:48if the SWIFT is turned off.

00:49All foreign goods are paid for by card.

00:52How will we purchase them?

00:54Yes, many businesses will notably suffer now

00:57tourism and logistics and airlines will suffer.

01:00Well, maybe that's how it has to be.

01:02From across the border,

01:04Ukraine's foreign minister issued a plea to the Russian people.

01:07You have a very simple tool to stop this madness.

01:11Demand from Putin to stop the war.

01:13On the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg,

01:16they answered that call.

01:17I don't want this war.

01:19Almost no one here wants it.

01:21I want the whole world to see that we don't want it.

01:24People are dying.

01:25People are suffering.

01:27There is a destruction.

01:28It will be handed down from generation to generation.

01:32Hatred for each other.

01:33In Putin's Russia, voicing dissent has lethal consequences.

01:37Critics are poisoned.

01:38Opposition leaders jailed.

01:40Ordinary citizens disappeared.

01:43One Russian human rights monitor estimates

01:45almost 6,000 protesters have been arrested

01:47since the invasion began five days ago.

01:50Many more bound to follow.

01:52The authorities here know a lot of people in Moscow

01:54are not happy with what's happening in Kyiv.

01:58They're scared of their own people.

02:00So as his soldiers struggle in Ukraine,

02:03is Putin losing the war on the home front?

02:06We're joined by Jake Cordell from the Moscow Times now.

02:09Jake, how significant do you think these protests are?

02:12Yeah, it's quite hard to tell,

02:14but we know that the protests have happened.

02:16We know that there's quite a lot of people

02:17coming out onto the streets.

02:19We know that there's been a big police response.

02:21More than 6,000 people have been arrested

02:23in the last few days at these protests.

02:26Whenever in Moscow you see people on the streets,

02:28you have to realise that protesting in Moscow is illegal.

02:31So these people are taking a huge risk,

02:33as we've seen from the police crackdown.

02:35And for every one or two people on the street,

02:37you can probably guess there were 20, 50, 100,

02:39maybe at home, thinking about coming out onto the street.

02:42There is some discontent among society,

02:44and people are angry enough to go out onto the streets,

02:47even though they know there's a very decent chance

02:50they're going to get arrested or beaten by police.

02:52So how hard are the sanctions?

02:54Well, we're already seeing the sanctions

02:56hitting ordinary Russians.

02:57The Russian currency, the ruble,

02:58has fallen by 20, 30, 40% over the last few weeks.

03:02It's been incredibly volatile.

03:04Prices have already gone up 30% overnight.

03:07And the Kremlin just recently has banned Russians

03:09from sending money abroad.

03:11They're so scared about Russians trying to get their money

03:14out of this country,

03:15which is really becoming very heavily economically isolated

03:18in a very short period of time.

03:20So how is that affecting the sentiment towards Putin

03:24and towards the West?

03:27Again, it's very hard to tell in Russia.

03:29You don't really have reliable polling information

03:31about where the public's at,

03:33but we know that they are more against this war,

03:35more against this foreign policy decision

03:37than any previous Kremlin foreign policy decision.

03:41If we compare to when Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014,

03:44there was euphoria.

03:45There was a rally around the flag.

03:46People loved Putin for returning what they saw as Russian land.

03:50That's clearly not happening this time around.

03:52The other issue which complicates this

03:54is how much Russians know about the military side of the campaign.

03:58The Russian state TV is very heavily pushing down.

04:01It's even banned TV outlets from calling the war a war.

04:05So that's how little information Russians are getting about this.

04:08So that protest sentiment, that discontent,

04:11at the moment seems concentrated among liberal people in cities,

04:15younger people who are more getting their information online,

04:18maybe even reading Western sources.

04:19Now, whether that filters out into the wider public

04:22is probably going to be a result of the economic consequences

04:25in the next weeks, months,

04:26because you maybe have to hide some images

04:28of Russian missiles raining down on cities in Kiev,

04:31but you can't hide the fact that when someone goes to the supermarket

04:34to buy their weekly food shop,

04:35the prices have gone up 10, 20, 30%.

04:37Whether Russians blame the West or Russia

04:40for the implication of sanctions, that remains to be seen.

04:43So could this groundswell of discontent,

04:47tentative though it may be at this point,

04:48could it be enough that Putin faces a genuine threat

04:52to his leadership?

04:53I think the question we have to ask there is

04:55where does the threat come from?

04:56There's no political leader in Russia right now that's free.

05:00The main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny,

05:02has been in prison for about a year and a half.

05:05And so there's really no kind of threat or figurehead

05:08to this protest movement at the moment.

05:10The one area people are looking at as a possible sign of discontent,

05:13someone that could influence Putin,

05:15is the military and security chiefs around him,

05:17the people he listens to.

05:18And that's because if the war doesn't go to plan,

05:20which it doesn't look like it is at the moment,

05:22although it's early days,

05:24are they going to get frustrated at Putin for his leadership?

05:27Are they going to push back against his ideas for an invasion?

05:30And that's where any kind of source of potential discontent

05:33that may have an influence is probably likely to come from.

05:36Jake, you are speaking to us from the capital of a repressive authoritarian regime.

05:43How free do you feel to report, honestly?

05:46Do you fear ramifications for your reporting?

05:50For foreign journalists here,

05:52it's a little bit different from for Russian journalists here.

05:55Historically, traditionally, Russia hasn't gone after foreign journalists

05:59who are reporting in foreign language.

06:01Now, that has changed recently, actually.

06:03Last year, we saw the expulsion of a British journalist from the BBC

06:07who the Russians said was a security threat.

06:10But I think we have to put it in context compared to what our Russian colleagues are facing

06:13who are being labelled foreign agents,

06:15the threat of having their bank accounts frozen,

06:17the threat of having being arrested,

06:19a knock on the door in the morning from the FSB coming to search their apartments.

06:23That's the daily reality for Russian journalists.

06:26And that's why when we come back to how Russians feel about the war,

06:29the question is how much information are they getting about the war

06:33with such a heavy push down on independent media reporting?

06:37Jake, thank you so much for your insights tonight.

06:39Thank you very much.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended