Anne Applebaum

So what are people's opinions?

It almost doesn't matter because they won't tell you what their opinions are because they keep them to themselves.

I mean, I do have... There's a part of the Russian opposition that measures kind of sentiment on the Internet.

They use those kinds of metrics.

And they say that exhaustion with the war and disappointment with the war are pretty widespread.

And another metric you could look at is the number of...

Russian elite, people in the Russian elite who have fallen out of windows or have succumbed to mysterious accidents in the last couple of years.

And almost all of those are probably people who in some way were seen as insufficiently enthusiastic about the war or about Putin.

So it's pretty clear there's, you know, if Putin were to say tomorrow,

the war is over and now we can move on, I think people would be happy.

They would probably be very happy to end this terrible number of deaths.

I mean, imagine the United States.

Imagine 20,000 people a month dying or being mortally injured and how that would affect us and how we would be— We wouldn't do it.

Yeah, I think we do.

I don't think the Ukrainians underestimate them.

I mean, my last month, a lot of recent conversations I've had in Ukraine have been with people who say, right, we get it.

The Russians don't care how many people we kill.

I mean, we're going to go on killing them because...

That's how we keep our country sovereign.

But they shifted strategy some months ago and they began really focusing on hitting Russian oil export and oil refining facilities.