But another local resident, Nadezhda, saw nothing normal in what’s happening.<\/p>\n
“It took us four years to win World War Two, even though our soldiers had little food and water,” she told me.<\/p>\n
“Today we have all the resources we need. But this war goes on. I’m shocked.”<\/p>\n
How do the Russian authorities respond to people like Nadezhda, to Russians struggling to understand why the Kremlin’s so-called “special military operation” is taking so long, and how it can be that the war has come to their city?<\/p>\n
Russian officials regularly accuse the West of prolonging the war in Ukraine, blaming European leaders and Nato for supporting Kyiv.<\/p>\n
But on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin said nothing about the drone assault. The news bulletins on Russian TV channels barely mentioned it.<\/p>\n
When Russian newspapers reported the story the following day, I detected a common thread in their coverage: a coordinated message, perhaps, for the domestic audience. <\/p>\n
It can be summed up as this: “However bad it is for us, Ukraine’s suffering more”.<\/p>\n
“Our attacks are doing far more damage to Ukraine than Ukraine is doing to us,” declared the ultra-pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda.<\/p>\n
“Our strikes to demilitarise Ukraine are far more powerful and effective than Ukrainian attacks,” wrote the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets.<\/p>\n
The narrative was almost identical in the government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “Our attacks on defence enterprises working for the Ukrainian army are much more powerful than those which Russians, unfortunately, are having to deal with.”<\/p>\n
“Our strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure linked to the military-industrial complex are far more effective and produce more results,” commented business daily Kommersant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But another local resident, Nadezhda, saw nothing normal in what’s happening. “It took us four years to win…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-648832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}