MEDUZA/EN/VHF

For more than two months now, many Russians have openly supported the Kremlin's "special military operation" in Ukraine -- choosing to close their eyes to executions and rapes, the shelling of peaceful cities, unthinkable destruction, and millions of people losing their homes. Journalist Shura Burtin spent several weeks talking to Russian citizens about their thoughts and feelings about the war. For Meduza, Burtin recounts how fear and a sense of humiliation defeated Russians' humanity.

As Russia's military casualties in Ukraine continue to mount, Buryatia has emerged as the country's second-hardest hit region in terms of losses. The only place losing more men is Dagestan. Nevertheless, the speeches at the near daily funerals in Ulan-Ude and other Buryatian cities still resound with support for Russia's war against "Nazis" and gratitude for the fallen soldiers not being "left behind," but shipped home for burial. At the end of April, the local magazine People of the Baikal published a report about how Buryatia is burying their dead soldiers, and what their loved ones and the regional authorities think about these losses. With their permission, Meduza has translated their article in full.

Russia's war propaganda has begun co-opting Soviet symbols with increasing frequency. Monuments to the "grandmother with the Soviet flag," for example, have popped up across the country. And both Kremlin officials and propaganda narratives continue to frame Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an extension of the "Great Patriotic War." Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev looked into the Kremlin's "Soviet" agitprop and learned how it's connected to Moscow's drive to annex new territories.

On May 13, the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga published an in-depth investigation into a new method the city's police have devised for suppressing protests: shortly before planned protest rallies, security officials use bomb threat charges to detain large groups of activists and hold them in detention facilities for 48 hours, causing them to miss the protests. On March 5, just one day before a nationwide protest rally against the war, St. Petersburg police used this method to arrest dozens of people; the same technique was used to curtail protests on Victory Day. Read Meduza's summary of the investigation in English below.

Moscow has yet to confirm the exact number of Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine. According to various estimates, Russia's full-scale invasion has involved up to 100,000 troops. In interviews with Meduza, several relatives of contract soldiers said that it's impossible for them to resign from military service -- those that attempt to quit are threatened with criminal charges of desertion and treason. Meduza correspondent Sasha Sivtsova reports on how Russian soldiers are being sent into Ukraine and how they're forced to stay there.

Since early April, Kremlin propaganda has celebrated "Granny Anya" as a symbol of supposed Ukrainian popular support for Russia's "special military operation." Anna Ivanovna Ivanova, a 69-year-old woman who lives in Velyka Danylivka (a town outside Kharkiv), became an icon in Russia after appearing in a viral Internet video where she greeted a group of soldiers with a Soviet flag and said she was praying for Vladimir Putin. More recently, however, Ukrainian officials released an interview with Ivanova, revealing that the war had forced her and her husband to flee their home. Correspondents from BBC Russia met with Ivanova (who's returned to Velyka Danylivka) and learned that she opposes Russia's invasion and wishes only for peace. Meduza summarizes what Anna Ivanova told the BBC.

The first step of Putin's "special military operation" against Ukraine ended with the creation of an occupied bridgehead in the south of the country that's adjacent to Russian-annexed Crimea on one side and to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic on the other. Russia's military has captured the majority of the Kherson region and part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In the occupied cities, Russian occupants and their collaborators have set up "civilian-military administrations," hiding the imperial nature of the new regime. Now, the Kremlin is trying to engineer a repeat of what happened in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 -- but whether it succeeds will depend on what happens on the battlefield.

A month has passed since a Ukrainian missile strike sank the Russian warship Moskva. In total, there were around 500 people aboard the vessel, which was the Black Sea Fleet's flagship. The Russian Defense Ministry has only acknowledged that one sailor was killed, while claiming that another 27 are missing. On condition of anonymity, the mother of a conscripted sailor who disappeared aboard the Moskva told Meduza about her month-long battle with the Russian authorities for information about her son.

Bohdan is an airfield service employee at Hostomel Airport, which was the site of heavy fighting at the very start of the war. For three weeks, he and his family lived in the basement of their apartment building, right across from the occupied airport. The building, which came under heavy fire at times, was occupied first by Chechen riot police, then by an airborne assault unit from Omsk. In mid-March, all of the basement's inhabitants were forcibly taken to Belarus. Bohdan told Meduza his story.

Bohdan is an airfield service employee at Hostomel Airport, which was the site of heavy fighting at the very start of the war. For three weeks, he and his family lived in the basement of their apartment building, right across from the occupied airport. The building, which came under heavy fire at times, was occupied first by Chechen riot police, then by an airborne assault unit from Omsk. In mid-March, all of the basement's inhabitants were forcibly taken to Belarus. Bohdan told Meduza his story.