Ukraine's Deep Strikes Boost Russia's Hawks
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- Zelensky's 40-day deep-strike campaign, launched to "push the aggressor toward ending the war," now operates at peak intensity with backing from the White House, President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and major European NATO states.
- Independent pollster Chronicles finds Russian opinion split: 29.8% view the war instrumentally (blocking NATO expansion, defending sovereignty), 31.4% hold no clear view, and roughly one-quarter frame it morally in terms of historical justice and defeating "Nazism."
- The moral minority gains leverage as costs rise — pro-war Telegram channels show escalating demands for harsher reprisals, and oligarch Konstantin Malofeev told this year's St. Petersburg International Economic Forum the "optimistic" endgame is capturing Kyiv and Odesa, collapsing the EU, and deploying nuclear weapons to "intimidate" the West.
- Anti-war speech carries steep legal costs: since 2022, Russia has opened tens of thousands of administrative cases for "discrediting the armed forces" and hundreds of criminal cases for spreading "false information," while Yabloko, the only party openly calling for peace, has had members prosecuted or jailed.
- A February 2026 Presidential Administration document leaked to the Dossier Center warned the war risks a Pyrrhic victory and proposed a "controlled thaw" for the war-weary majority alongside manufactured "discrediting" charges to muzzle the restive minority.
- The source argues Western policymakers should decouple support for deep strikes from the belief they can compel a ceasefire, since eroding Putin's domestic support is not the same as building a Russian demand for peace.
Why it matters: If the source's analysis is correct, the West's core coercive premise is inverted: escalating strikes may empower the constituency most opposed to any deal short of maximalist goals, while tens of thousands of "discrediting" cases keep the cost-weary majority silent — leaving Putin trapped between a loud hawk minority and a repressed dove majority with no clear off-ramp to a frozen peace.
