That is changing now. State television is mobilizing the population in a way never seen before under Putin. The Russians are said to face an existential threat from the West to destroy their country.
The television called on the Russians to support their president, or as he is now more commonly called “commander in chief.”
Celebrities who oppose the war are described as “traitors”.
Viewers are insensitive to the violence perpetrated by their sons, brothers and husbands in Ukraine, but such a process does not happen overnight.
Although claims that Ukrainians are Nazis are new to most outside Russia, for about 70 percent of Russians who sociologists say turn to state television as a major source of news, this is a well-established fact.
Even after the pro-European revolution in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, state television gradually determined that people saw Ukrainians as inferior. I’ve seen this play out with people I care about.
I recently received a call from a Russian friend. As part of my diploma, I spent a year in the city of Ekaterinburg, a two-hour flight east of Moscow.
There I met Victor, in his fifties, who accepted me into his family. I spent many weekends at his dacha, perfecting my conversational Russian and loving his simpler lifestyle, chopping firewood and looking for mushrooms in the nearby forest.
We have always been wary of politics, but now he inevitably asks me how I find my job.
I try to answer with a short “okay, thank you”, but he persists. “We are glued to our TV. Our boys are fighting the Nazis in Ukraine. But things are fine here. We still don’t feel your sanctions, “he smiles.
How do I feel at the end of a day spent watching such a vitriol? It is humiliating to hear that nuclear war is mentioned almost every day. But when I hear such belligerent rhetoric, I withdraw into a state of emotional detachment.
It is only when I step away from my screen that I face the horror of suffering in Ukraine.
I was recently a translator in a BBC radio interview with a wedding photographer who successfully escaped the besieged city of Mariupol.
He spoke of people drinking from puddles and rotting bodies left unburied by the shelling.
This is a war fought with bullets and artillery. But it started years ago on Russian television.
Francis Scarr is a journalist with BBC Monitoring, which reports and analyzes news from media around the world.
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