Only 8% of Russians believe Vladimir Putin is responsible for the death of Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, according to a poll taken nine hours after the plane crash that killed him.
An online survey by the Open Minds Institute, an international think tank, for The Sunday Times showed that only 2% of regime supporters see Putin as the guilty party. Blame for Putin rose to 21% among Russians the organization classifies as “moderate” and 50% among “liberals.”
The largest number of respondents, 28.4 percent, believed the crash was staged, while 28.3 percent blamed technical problems or pilot error.
“Two percent of regime supporters who blame Putin for Prigogine’s death seems like a very small number. I think they don’t dare to imagine that Putin would do that, because it will completely destroy their perception of reality,” says Svyatoslav Gnizdovsky, the Ukrainian chief executive of the think tank, originally founded in March last year to research public opinion in Russia, told The Times.
Achieving accurate poll results in authoritarian states is difficult. A bias in favor of the regime due to fear of repercussions cannot be ruled out. However, anonymous online questionnaires such as this are believed to have less bias than surveys conducted in person or over the phone.
The Open Minds Institute selects questions that ask what others feel, which may allow respondents in Russia to more honestly share their own feelings about the public mood.
Although only 13.6 percent of those polled thought another Wagner rebellion was likely, almost a quarter believed most Russians would support it.
70% of respondents also agree to some extent with the statement that Prigozhin was an unjustly killed hero of the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.
“In terms of the impact on Russian society, we see this likely expectation of a second coup and feelings of anxiety, tension and sadness over his death. Meanwhile, the elite see that Russia has become a mafia state where conflicts are resolved in this extrajudicial way : this is actually a public execution,” says Gnizdowski. “You can compare it to the 1934 Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s purges. Wagner’s troops hoped that Prigogine might have a life in exile like Trotsky’s, but while Stalin’s it took 11 years to kill Trotsky, Putin only needed two months to destroy Prigozhin.”
Working on the post:
2023-08-27 13:45:00
#Russians #Putin #Prigogines #death
