According to the results of opinion polls conducted by VTSIOM and FOM, more than 60% of Russians support a "special military operation" in Ukraine. But it is necessary to interpret these data carefully: according to the same polls in Russia, millions of people oppose the war, and among young residents of large cities who rarely watch TV and receive information mainly from the Internet, there are generally a majority of such people. Especially for Medusa, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Exeter (England) Alexey Bessudnov analyzed in detail the results of the VTSIOM survey.
Graph 1. The results of "state" opinion polls are almost the same. But it does not follow from them that the Russians support the war.
After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, two sociological companies — VTSIOM and FOM — conducted surveys and asked respondents about their attitude to these events. The results show that about 65% of Russians are more likely to support a "special military operation" in Ukraine. But can these numbers be trusted? After all, VTSIOM and FOM are controlled by the Russian state (the first belongs to the state, the main customer of the second is the presidential administration).