What do you mean “Finally”? The protests in Russia started on 24th of February 2022. Over 1000 protesters were detained just in Moscow that day alone. And the protests continued after that.
The problem is, these protests achieved nothing, they only resulted in fines (which undoubtedly went to funding the war), protesters being beaten, detained and some even got a criminal charge. So the protests died down because continuing them only fueled the regime more. Some people shifted to solitary picketing, some started doing online activism, some started sabotaging the railways and burning down enlistment centers, some left the country altogether and some, undoubtedly, just gave up.
Bullshit, protests have been anecdotal by very few individuals. Considering it’s been almost 2 years now, and Putin has send hundreds of thousands Russians to war to die in a senseless war, It’s crazy Russians are not at least passively resisting.
The biggest protest was 1000 protestors in a city of 12 million and country of 140 million!!
This is 10000 protestors in a city of 17000, clearly there’s a difference. The Russian people are pathetic, allowing family, friends and themselves to be senselessly slaughtered.
In the months after the war started Russia arrested nearly 15,000 protestors. Many of them have been tortured by police after the arrests. We have video proof of that. Still after mobilization 2000 more were arrested. All of that after years of beating down on civil society. The problem with protests is that so far you only end up suffering badly for it. So the risk is just not worth it.
So what happened then was that over a million Russians left the country directly after the invasion started and more after conscription was announced. Pretty sure they did not feel like dieing for Putin.
You also have a massive chain smoking problem in Russia. Some of the targets do not seem to be very interesting to Ukraine, but very interesting for Russian anti war groups. One of them is the recent fire in the Wildberries warehouse near St Petersburg.
