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Living their best life
And here, the reader will stop for a second and most likely ask the question — but what about Russians, don’t they want the war to stop?
And the answer is most likely no.
Recently, I fell into a rabbit hole, watching videos posted by ordinary Russians on Instagram. It all started when on Twitter (X), people began discussing a post by a Russian blogger who wrote that Moscow is beautiful, sprinkling it with hate speech.
The blogger, who clearly was working with the local government to promote Moscow, basically said that the Russian capital is the best city in the world because it’s clean, everyone is happy, and there are no homeless people and “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”
Displaying a rainbow flag is a criminal offense in Russia.
I went to his page and looked at the videos he was posting. And then some more videos from people living in Moscow.
For a person living in Kyiv, bombarded on a nearly daily basis, this was a very interesting dive. Watching those videos, you would never think that their country is at war.
Moscow has experienced a few waves of transformation since 2022.
Before the start of the all-out war, Moscow was thought to be the most liberal Russian city. The Russian capital harbored people with higher education and better income. Opposition activists were living their lives in Moscow cafes. Late opposition leader Alexei Navalny even once ran in the city’s mayoral election and gained a substantial number of votes.
As soon as the all-out war started, there were even some protests in Moscow, and some members of the local art and culture scene, those who traveled abroad and saw the world, were not supportive of their country’s slide into totalitarianism.
Still, Moscow was far away from the war. Cafes were still packed and people’s day to day, if they weren’t in active opposition, only changed insignificantly.
In late 2022, this changed. When Russia faced one military defeat after another, the local government was instructed to make the war felt in Moscow.
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, who at first deliberately distanced himself from the war effort, was now traveling to the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, and banners depicting Russian soldiers appeared on the city’s streets.
The 2022 Russian forced mobilization campaign saw police grab people from Moscow’s streets and send them to fight in Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians, most of them from major cities such as Moscow, left the country. Some of them for good.
Soon after that, Moscow changed once again. Since late 2023, Russia has been on the offensive. Those who were against the war or actively opposed it are no longer in the country. The Kremlin also has enough troops and hardware to continue the fight indefinitely. It doesn’t need to rely on forced mobilization — instead, it uses high wages to lure volunteers.
It doesn’t need to shove the war in the face of Moscow residents, especially those who do not care. The government is now deliberately shielding the residents of its most important metropolis from the hardships that a war can bring.
Bars, cafes, concerts, new metro stations, international football stars visiting the city, and playing friendlies with the local players who are banned from international competitions. People are living their best lives, while their compatriots, friends or even relatives are murdering civilians in Ukraine.
Watching the videos from 2025 Moscow is a surreal experience. I can’t stop thinking that it must be similar to what life was like in Berlin in 1941 for those who didn’t care about the atrocities their country was committing.
Source: Oleksiy Sorokin, WTF is wrong with Russia? newsletter (Kyiv Independent), 17 July 2025. This post is dedicated to Nan Kim, who has supported this website with a monthly donation for the last two years. I would like to apologize to her for posting so infrequently in the past few months. The work-at-home jobs which over the last eighteen years also afforded me the time and space to produce this website have dried up or disappeared altogether (along with all other donations to this website), so I have had to take work that keeps me away from home most of the day nearly every day. This extreme slowdown in producing this blog is not necessarily a bad thing for me personally. Among other things, it keeps me from asking the question Oleksiy Sorokin asks at the top of this entry: don’t Russians want the war to stop? \\\ TRR
