NOT A GOOD ELECTION DAY

The trouble around Moscow and St.Petersburg was low key for the most part, give or take a couple of bombings at polling stations. Protests included an older woman setting fire to her vote and burning the booth down, several attempts to set fire to ballot boxes, and by all accounts a lot of protest votes and spoiled voting papers, many with abusive names written on them.
The police in several towns were there to make sure your vote wasn’t cast for the wrong person. Some actually standing over voters while they filled their vote out.
There were said to be several incidences of jostling and police bullying. In one case police were seen taking the votes out of the boxes and ‘correcting’ them. And all on camera! They just don’t care at all.
Meanwhile ‘liberation forces’ are still running amok in the Belgorod and Kursk regions, with grad like rockets actually seen landing in Belgorod centre, suggesting
they aren’t terribly far away. Of course the purpose is maximising disruption and chaos and making a point. The Russian authorities seem unable to stop it and are just waiting for the whole thing to peter out by itself.
The election protest on the scale they seem to have been this year are unprecedented in the Putin era. There’s a lot more dissatisfaction and resentment, palpable frustration, under the surface.
Economic conditions are worse. Money doesn’t last and prices rise, but payments for pensioners especially don’t go up anything like the amount they need to.
The death toll at the front is reaching millions of people at home.
Based on the idea that every soldier had ten people in their extended families and friends who cared directly about them, that alone is 4,000,000 directly affected by every death. Most of them would know other families and their friends with another 10 people in their work, colleagues, direct friendships, let alone acquaintances. Overall
Some 10 million people know what’s going on and with the way the grapevine works ten times that are very aware something isn’t right and they don’t like it.
Most are of course too afraid to say or do anything. Yet those propaganda channels have less viewers with every passing month. Some of the hard core opinion shows and ‘debates’ have audiences below 1%. People have cut themselves off from ‘news’ and fake reality. They stick their heads in the sand and hope nothing happens.
Sadly that’s not really how the Russian world works. Sooner or later it reaches you. It happened in the stringent oppression of the Soviet era and it will happen again to Putin. That’s how Russia changes. Eventually people have enough and it’s usually messy. It can’t come soon enough.
The Analyst
@ukrainejournal