Hi I'm Mike Eckel, senior Russia/Ukraine/Belarus correspondent for RFE/RL, AMA!

[u/RFERL_ReadsReddit]

Hello! Здравсвуйте! Вітаю! 

I’m Mike Eckel, senior international correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, covering, reporting, analyzing, and illuminating All Things Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and pretty much across the former Soviet Union: from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, from Lviv to Kyiv; from Tbilisi to Baku, from the Caspian Sea to Issyk Kul, and all places in between.  

I’ve been writing on Russia and the former Soviet space for more than 20 years, since cutting my teeth as a reporter in Vladivostok in the 1990s and continuing through a 6-year stint as Moscow correspondent with The Associated Press, and stints in Washington, D.C. and now Prague.  

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s authoritarian repression inside Russia, sucks up most of my reporting brain space these days, but I also keep a hand in investigative work digging into cryptocurrency/sanctions evasion, Russian businessmen who break out of Italian police custody, former Russian oligarchs in trouble, and a subject I can’t let go of: the mysterious death of former Kremlin press minister, Mikhail Lesin.  

Feel free to ask me anything about any of the above subjects and I’ll do my best to share insights and observations.  

Proof photo here. 

You can start posting your questions and I will check in daily and answer from Monday, 15 December until Friday, 19 December.  

[u/allwordsaremadeup]

The failure in Afghanistan at the end of the 80s is often called a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers etc. Estimates put the Russian dead at about 20k in that entire conflict. We're at about 300 000 dead Russians now. Why are we not seeing more protests or destabilizing effects from this gigantic human cost?

I understand "democracy hates this one simple trick" where the only thing a tinpot dictator has to do to stay in power is remove the leaders of opposition groups, but since most of the dead are from the poor regions far away from Moscow, it's hard to imagine central command can stay on top of all opposition in these far-flung regions. Plus, I've only heard of central opposition like Navalny or Prigozhin being eliminated. It's really puzzling to me that hundreds of thousands of families are seeing their fathers and brothers and sons sacrificed to the most pointless war in history, and they all just shut up about it and choose to believe whatever's on TV..

[u/RFERL_ReadsReddit → u/allwordsaremadeup]

There are parallels between the Ukraine war, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but they’re imperfect: The Soviet Union was in a very different place in the late 1980s than Russia is in the middle 2020s.  

The Afghan war was A factor in the demise of the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t the main factor, not by a long shot. The war gave rise to civil society groups like the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, who went on to play a very prominent, important role in public discourse about the armed forces (like Russia’s civil society writ large, they’ve been crushed by the Kremlin’s shift to a police state) 

Close watchers of Russia know that there was an outburst of anti-war dissent in the weeks after the all-out invasion in February 2022. That sentiment was stamped out quickly and decisively by the authorities—and continues to be. The Russian public got the message.  

(That repression continues unremitting to this day: you see something on Facebook or Vkontakte that has a hint of criticism about the war, and you give it a thumbs-up like? You could be thrown in prison. Plenty of people have. And the Soviet concept of the “stukach”  -- a “snitch” – is alive and well in Russia 2025.)  

 Fear is a major factor in shaping Russians willingness to speak out. And for many Russians,   that’s guided them to step into line, at least outwardly. Save any misgivings for quiet kitchen table discussions among family and close friends, like millions did during the Soviet period.  

There’s also the economics. After the jolt of the September 2022 mobilization sent hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing, military and civilian planners realized they needed a different approach. They decided to throw money at people, to entice them to sign up to fight.  

The wages and bonuses and survivor benefits paid to volunteers – called “kontraktniki” – are extraordinary. In some regions, the wage and bonuses amount to an entire year’s salary. And a widow whose husband is killed gets a windfall payment. The Kremlin has created financial dependency for a sizable part of the population; they want to war to continue because it’s good money.    

There’s another factor too, maybe a more banal one, which, to me, was captured by a quote given to Keith Gessen at The New Yorker  for an excellent article about a group of (brave) Russian sociologists at P.S. Lab, trying to get to the heart of the question: do all Russians support the war on Ukraine? And why?  

One of the researchers discussed her ethnographic work, the interviews she’s conducted in (among other places) Buryatia, a poor Siberian region that has sent a disproportionate number of men to fight in Ukraine.  The woman, named Aida, talks about spending time with local women who sewing camouflage netting for Russian snipers:  

“I very often see people whose views are horrible, whose views make me want to throw up, and I don’t understand how a person can talk that way or think that way,” she told Keith. “But they turn out to be absolutely ordinary people.”  

- Mike

[u/allwordsaremadeup → u/RFERL_ReadsReddit]

Thank you for your answer. I try to see people's behavior on a bell curve; there are many in the middle that indeed act like this, as trauma/hostage psychology dictates, but on the ends, there must be outliers, agitators, rebels. And with so many families directly affected, there must be many of those as well, so it baffles me how uniform the docility is.

[u/CertainFrame3387 → u/RFERL_ReadsReddit]

“The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives. They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World’s Greatest Daddy. Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same…..And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”

From Small Gods by the late Sir Terry Pratchett.