Why are Russian families not outraged by the mounting death toll?
Our senior correspondents and military experts have been answering your questions on the war in Ukraine.
Today's comes from Bradley, who says: My understanding of why the Soviets lost the Afghanistan conflict was that families back home were outraged that 15,000 men had died during the conflict.
With even significantly higher casualties during the current war,
why are Russian families not asking questions?
Our
Moscow correspondent Diana Magnay gave this answer...
True - after 17 months of war in Ukraine the
Russians have lost by recent estimates as many as 50,000 men, many more than the 15,000 over the nine years the Soviets fought in Afghanistan (even if the USSR had twice the population that Russia does now).
But it was a lack of political will on the part of the Politburo and new leader Mikhail Gorbachev to continue an unwinnable war rather than public disaffection at the casualty figures that caused the Soviets to pull out of Afghanistan.
Russian families are feeling the hit, but in scattered cities, towns and villages across the vastness of Russia with no real possibility, given laws against discrediting the armed forces, of uniting in shared anger or potential opposition towards the state.
Anger on social media groups tends to be directed against failings within the army's structure and command than at the notion of the war itself.
That may change as time wears on with no discernible victory, especially as veterans return home and stoke potential unrest as well as disenchantment. They will be angry, traumatised and disenfranchised.
For now, though, Vladimir Putin pitches this battle as existential and a fight for Russia's survival against NATO and the West and the propaganda is effective.
Families want to believe their menfolk are dying for a reason and the country as a whole does not have a sense of the true scale of the casualties.
Gorbachev was responsible for ushering in an era of openness and questioning with his reforms of glasnost and perestroika; Mr Putin has spent the best part of the past two decades trying to crush any kind of open debate.
The mood in the country may well turn and the Kremlin should be nervous about that, but it has not yet.
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War is evil....
