This is a slightly edited version of a thread I made on Twitter 27 Feb 2022. I have obscured identities.

“Don’t want to do a long thread but I said I’d update with the ‘everyman’ view from the ‘averagely informed’ Russian [some people didn’t like this wording, but I leave it here]. So far, it can be summarised as everything we see in Western media about conflict in Ukraine is transformed into a kind of Alice thru the Looking Glass world for some of these people.

That means, for example, the difficulty in even starting a conversation with my acquaintance who I text a couple of times a month. I gingerly tested the waters with her. She’s c.35 years old, and her sister has a kid who’s 18. I text: ‘everything ok? I hope you’re keeping Dima away from the enlistment office’. Her answer ‘What?’

I paused and thought long and hard before continuing and choosing my words carefully: ‘There are a lot of conscripts in Ukraine, it seems.’ She: ‘Yes, I heard that. Poor Ukrainian mothers.’ I.e. she interpreted it ‘through the looking glass’ – subsequently it was obvious she thought I was talking about ‘poor Ukrainian conscripts’ being forced to fight. Later she talked about avoiding television news and only vaguely knew there was a ‘special operation’ in Donbas.

Older bloke: ‘mood is good. A quick jaunt to Kiev and back in time for tea. Without too many casualties. Symmetrical sanctions – you’ve got more to lose. Jobs a good-un’. President looking firm, saying the right thing.’

I have always held complex views about rally-round the flag effects (it’s decay was faster than people think after 2014, it’s ‘drowned out’ by material concerns), but this man is a ‘putin-sceptic’, so his positive comments about Putin alarm me.

Woman in 50s: ‘Russia has never invaded anyone; we don’t have taking territory in our military doctrine. Did you see ‘wag the dog’? You could learn a lot about what’s happening in the US with Biden’s unpopularity’. Again, you can see a kind of ‘trickle down’ of media talking points here in a garbled way.

Texts in the night: He: ‘Why are you awake?’ Me: ‘I can’t sleep – watching the war.’

He: ‘Completely f’up. I’m watching the tele – explosions, wounded, tanks.’

I respond: ‘Kyiv being hit by rockets’. No answer for last 2 days to that message.

My ‘conscious’ friend, as he calls himself, in his 30s: “we’ll this is f**ed up. What does the overseas say? Putinists don’t care -they’ll burn the world to get their way… everyone thinks we are driving the Nazis out of Ukraine! Even a friend here showed his colours! He seemed ok before.’

My friend continues [who incidentally is unemployed mechanic without higher ed]: ‘It’s not TV, it’s inertial thinking and low capacity for critical reasoning. And absence of alt sources of info. If the economy wasn’t so bad people would have a chance to ‘look up”

And then he ends: ‘What is the opinion of people outside of Russia? On what is happening now? Surely there is no one who thinks that Russia is doing a good deed? See you in ten years, if God wills it. It’s tragicomic [И смех и грех]’

One reader objected to my categorization of some of these people as ‘averagely informed’, or ‘unemployed without higher education’. The point is that while Russian media messaging and broader discourses do shape opinion, they don’t dictate it. Similarly, an abiding theme of my writing is that especially when it comes to xenophobia and bigotry, we should avoid facile assumptions about correlations with class.