What Is Not Said: The Private Reckoning of Ordinary Russians

Sunday 15 February 2026

There is a familiar ritual when journalists speak to ordinary Russians about the war in Ukraine. The answers are clipped, guarded and often formulaic. Some repeat official language. Others retreat into apathy. Many simply say nothing at all. To read these encounters at face value is to misunderstand both Russia and the people who live within her borders. The real story is not what is said to reporters, but what is thought in kitchens, stairwells and late-night silences.

Russia has lived for generations with a deep, learned distrust of the media. This is not merely a product of contemporary censorship, although that is now pervasive. It is historical muscle memory. Under the Soviet Union public speech was performative, not expressive. People learned early that the safest words were those that carried no personal meaning. That habit did not disappear in the 1990s. It has simply been reactivated, refined and reinforced.

As a result, the disjunction between public utterance and private conscience is wide. The Russian who tells a journalist that he or she “does not follow politics” may spend hours replaying the same questions in her head. The man who says the war is “necessary” may say it because that sentence has the lowest personal cost, not because it resolves anything within him.

What, then, might be taking place beneath the surface?

For many, there is likely a slow, corrosive confusion. The war has never been explained in terms that withstand even gentle scrutiny. The stated aims shift. The timelines dissolve. The victories announced on television bear little resemblance to the funerals quietly taking place in provincial towns. Even those inclined to believe state narratives are confronted by contradictions that cannot be fully reconciled. Cognitive dissonance becomes a daily companion.

There is also fear, but not always the dramatic kind. It is the ordinary fear of consequences. Russians know, instinctively, that speech can travel. A careless remark in the wrong place can have professional or legal repercussions. Silence becomes a form of self-preservation. Over time, that silence hardens into habit. One stops rehearsing dissent aloud, then eventually stops articulating it clearly even to oneself.

Yet conscience does not vanish so easily. Many Russians have personal, cultural or familial connections to Ukraine. The idea that this is a war against an abstract enemy becomes difficult to maintain when the names of cities are familiar, when the language sounds like one spoken by a grandmother, when the dead resemble people one knows. The moral discomfort may not be articulated as opposition to the state, but it can surface as shame, grief or a vague sense of wrongness that has nowhere to go.

Another layer is resentment, not towards Ukraine, but towards the narrowing of life itself. The war has made Russia smaller. Travel has become harder. Opportunities have evaporated. Futures feel provisional. Even those who support the war in principle may privately resent the way it has closed doors and flattened horizons. That resentment does not require a political vocabulary. It is felt as irritation, fatigue and a dull anger that lacks an obvious target.

There is also the burden of inherited narratives. Russia has long told herself stories about sacrifice, encirclement and historical destiny. These stories are powerful, but they demand constant emotional labour. To sustain them in the face of mounting losses requires effort. For some the effort is exhausting. For others it produces a quiet bitterness at being asked, once again, to endure hardship for reasons that are never fully explained.

What is striking is not that many Russians appear disengaged when questioned, but that disengagement itself may be the coping mechanism. To speak honestly would require confronting a moral reality that offers no clear path to action. Protest is dangerous. Emigration is not possible for everyone. Compliance feels degrading. In such a landscape emotional withdrawal can seem like the only viable option.

This does not absolve Russian society of responsibility. Private doubts do not stop missiles. Silent consciences do not protect Ukrainian civilians. But understanding the interior lives of ordinary Russians helps explain why the war grinds on without visible internal rupture. The absence of public dissent is not proof of moral clarity or collective enthusiasm. It may instead reflect a population living with unresolved questions that are never safely spoken.

In the final analysis the most important conversations about the war in Ukraine are likely not happening in front of cameras or microphones. They are happening, if at all, in half-formed thoughts, in moments of unease, in the spaces between what is said and what is felt. For a society trained over decades to separate inner truth from outer speech, that gap is not an anomaly. It is the place where conscience survives, quietly, under pressure.