Comments by "" (@mitchrodee) on "Can we protest?" video.

Protesting and marching, and collecting signatures on a petition, as well as supporting and electing like-minded politicians are important, but they’ll not be effective if the government isn’t open and transparent. Russia doesn’t have an open and transparent government of politicians elected to represent the will of the people. And, in all honesty, the Russian people do not express a willingness to fight for such a system. Anyways, for the few that are willing to fight, they need to resort to civil disobedience tactics. But with a state like Russia the consequences for civil disobedience will be harsh. However, economic boycotts are something they could —and should—consider. Whether or not they would work is questionable.
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@alexmiller23 , I’m in the US, but I’m sure that things are similar for Canadians and Europeans: we have elections every other year, they are carefully monitored and are fair and free, and the politicians we elect do a pretty good job at representing desires of the majority of the population. (We mainly vote for candidates, hardly ever on specific referendum questions.) However, most of the problems we face are complex, and so a bunch of us are never satisfied. We do all seem to have the freedom to address our grievances with our governments though, something Russians don’t seem to be able to do. The New York Times just published a story about how there’s a sharp increase in Russian citizens getting arrested for not being patriotic enough. Yikes! Western populations don’t worry about such a problem.
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@alexmiller23 , most Russians don’t speak or read English. Putin started cracking down on the few non-state media outlets back about fifteen years ago. The last few closed up and the reporters fled Russia pretty quickly after the war began. So the majority of Russians are only exposed to the information Putin releases through the state news channels. The younger liberal and tech-savvy Russians in the bigger cities use VPNs and have access to the outside world, but the older conservative folks outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg tend to believe their government’s propaganda. It’s no surprise that 75% or so are unaware of the truth of what is really happening. There are a handful of Russian YouTubers that speak English; they’ve been pretty good about conveying what’s going on without crossing the line of saying things that’ll get them into trouble. Their audiences consist of English speakers in the west, so Russians aren’t tuning in to them.
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