Ioffe can’t keep up with the snowballing absurdity of Russia’s nationalist fervor:
Within the span of a couple months, the Kremlin, by hook and by crook, has cleared all the media underbrush. There’s suddenly not much left of the independent media, even of what little of it there was left after Putin’s first two terms at the wheel.
She fears that the game is up for Moscow liberals:
What [they] are discovering is how quickly the ground has shifted beneath their feet since Putin came back to power in 2012, how futile and pathetic their resistance, and how easily wartime mobilization can steamroll them into nonexistence, in a way it couldn’t when Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008. This time, even their tiny Internet ghetto isn’t safe anymore. And it’s not clear that, once all this over and Crimea is safely part of Russia, that the regime will roll back these measures. In fact, it’s highly likely that it won’t.
Leonid Ragozin notices something all too familiar in Putin’s media manipulations:
One can clearly sense what’s next by following government propaganda, whose main target these days is the “fifth column”: journalists, opposition activists, and anyone else who dares to doubt the wisdom of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine. Here’s how it works: First an “investigative” documentary appears on government TV, then the authorities launch criminal cases against those that the documentary targeted (as was the case with left-wing leader Sergey Udaltsov, now on trial on charges of organizing riots). It was the same in Stalin’s times, when show trials were preceded by Pravda editorials pointing at “enemies of the people.”
And yet, Adam Taylor points out, the president’s star just keeps rising:
In a poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) last week, Putin’s popularity level in Russia has reached 71.6 percent. That’s a 9.7 percent increase since mid-February, which seems quite obviously linked to the Russian president’s handling of Ukraine and the Sochi Olympics. As Ria Novosti notes, it means that Putin’s popularity levels are now at a three-year high.
You might want to put that down to the fact that the VTsIOM is state-run, but that argument doesn’t really hold. The Levada Center, a well-respected independent polling center, has also found that Putin had a 72 percent approval rating, up 7 points from January and a recent record.
The Dish 