Anne Applebaum

And people are arrested for saying things that are against the war.

And so that means that if you're conducting an opinion poll and you call someone up and you say, how do you feel about the war, what are they going to tell you?

They're going to say, I'm all for it.

It's not a...

It's not something that you can measure.

And there isn't also a kind of public sphere in which these things are discussed.

It's not like there's a place where people talk about the war and debate whether it's good or bad in any real way.

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.