Russians in every major city and region call for #nowar

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is not going as planned on the ground. And even back home, the Russian autocrat is facing mounting resistance. On the first day of the invasion more than 1,300 people were arrested in anti-war protests in 51 Russian cities, according to OVD-info, a human-rights group. That number has now swollen to 5,959. Even more are taking their protests online. The hashtag “#нетвойне”, Russian for “no war”, started trending soon after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine.

These protest-posts already number in the hundreds of thousands. On Instagram, some 50,000 pictures with the anti-war hashtag were posted between February 26th and 27th alone and now total over 330,000—already 10% of the total number reached by #MeToo posts, which first went viral in 2017. (Twitter does not provide comparable statistics.)

To assess the geographical extent of this opposition, The Economist constructed a dataset of 51,773 unique posts from Twitter and Instagram that used the hashtag. Of these we were able to identify the geographic location of 7,120, of which 3,495 were marked as posted from within Russia. We found anti-war posts coming from Russia’s 50 largest cities, across all 11 time zones and in 83 out of 85 federal subjects (ie, regions, such as oblasts and republics). Abroad, the Russian-language hashtag was found in 91 other countries, including Ukraine, Belarus, America and China.

Those joining the movement have ranged from the country’s leading chess and tennis players to the daughter of Mr Putin’s own spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. Ivan Urgant, the host of a popular talk-show on Channel One, Russia’s main broadcaster, saw his programme taken off the air after he used the hashtag on Instagram (the channel claims this was because of a scheduling problem).

The Russian authorities have responded by tightening their grip on the internet. Access to Meta’s platforms have been restricted after Facebook refused to stop the independent fact-checking of Russian state-owned news content. Netblocks, an internet-monitoring group, also found that access to Twitter had been restricted in Russia by the morning of February 26th.

Even on these platforms, and others, such as Telegram and TikTok, fear of reprisals probably leads to a degree of self-censorship. The regime has been known to use facial-recognition software to identify and harass protesters. Some victims of this have said the authorities found their pictures on social media. The true force of opposition to Mr Putin’s war is unknown. ■

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