A major gulf in attitudes rose regarding Crimea, whose annexation was supported by 87 percent of Russians and opposed by 69 percent of Ukrainians. In Russia, both pro-Putin supporters and anti-Putin oppositionists like Alexei Navalny and Mikhail Khodorkovsky backed the annexation of Crimea. Seventy-nine percent of Russians linked that action to the revival of Russia as a great power and a return to Russias rightful dominance of the former Soviet Union. In 2010, with the election of Viktor Yanukovych, Russian attitudes toward Ukraine dramatically improved, doubling to a 70 percent approval rating. Yanukovych signed the Kharkiv Accords extending the Black Sea Fleet basing agreement to 2042, and Ukraine adopted a non-bloc foreign policy and changed its approach to national identity questions such as the Holodomor. In contrast, during the same period, the percentage of Russians holding positive views of Ukrainians plummeted from 55 to 34 percent.

• The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is in the words of one U.S. official a shift in "the world order."Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.
• Excluding such data from climate models makes them less accurate, and the problem will get worse over time, a new study warns.
• But as the war drags into a second year and as more Russians feel its effects on their daily lives especially the growing number of men drafted or conscripted into the armed forces the limitations of Kremlin propaganda are increasingly apparent.
• Business, housing and community services, medicine, education everything will sag.
• It could be their Soviet past, or the government propaganda that has been poured out for so many years, or just that there is too much fear and anxiety to actually allow the thought that the world is different from what they expect.

That is because its most avid proponents, and its most intractable opponents, will not change their minds. If those who see it as a just war start to suspect that it is slipping into an existential conflict with the West, or if conformists change their risk calculations because they face being drafted, the balance of opinion may shift decisively. The first, a blitzkrieg to capture Kyiv, failed within the first month.

Many Russians Feel a Deep Unease Over Going to War

One local family visiting St Petersburg were shocked to find nothing had changed while their own lives had been turned upside down. For Russian climate scientists who started their careers in the Soviet Union, the current situation can feel eerily familiar. People walk next to a cracked panel apartment building in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk in 2018. Climate change is causing permafrost, or permanently frozen ground, to thaw across the Arctic. When the earth thaws, it can destabilize building foundations, roads, pipelines and other infrastructure. A few years ago, Tape helped start the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, so scientists all around the Arctic could collaborate and share data.