Page 38 - bneIntelliNews monthly country report Russia May 2024

being confined by concrete end goals for the war.
As bne IntelliNews has reported, Russians are generally upbeat at the moment as the economy grow strongly thanks to the military Keynesianism boost that has also driven up incomes. Russia’s economy accelerated in the first two months of this year, growing by 7.7%.
Expectations for the future remain optimistic with the same cohort of respondents, 76%, anticipating "changes for the better" following the recent re-election of President Vladimir Putin by a landslide. Additionally, a substantial 78% of those surveyed believe that "the presidential election in Russia was conducted fairly" despite strong evidence that the Kremlin massaged the results as well as excluding all possible opposition candidates.
A mere 3% citing "war with Nato" and 2% advocating for regime change in Ukraine as their reasons for supporting the conflict. The notion of reclaiming "ancestral Russian lands" was mentioned by 6% of respondents, while the concept of combating "fascism" was referenced by only one in six individuals.
A major new survey suggests that, despite the turmoil and disasters of two years of the war against Ukraine, Moscow’s youth policies are more effective than many Western onlookers hope. The headline finding was that 82% of young Russians remain proud to be Russian citizens.
A mere 13% of those surveyed stated that their political views were markedly different from their parents’.
The survey, which polled over a thousand Russians aged 18-35, is the biggest and most important of its kind released since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With some caveats, the report indicates that young Russians are more receptive to the state’s increasingly violent and authoritarian messaging than might be assumed from the lavish Western press coverage afforded to youth protests.
Paramilitary and state-run youth groups have seen a boom in membership numbers. The Youth Army (Yunarmiya) paramilitary group, which teaches patriotic values and military skills designed to prepare children for military service, can barely keep up with demand as its numbers have — according to the latest and now outdated estimate— swelled to almost one and a half million.
The new Movement of the First (Dvizheniye pervykh) group, launched in December 2022 as a more palatable, de-militarised counterpart to the Youth Army, purportedly already counts millions of members among its ranks.
The survey finds that young Russians are in fact feeling increasingly positive about their future. Just over half of those polled were optimistic when imagining
38 RUSSIA Country Report May 2024 www.intellinews.com