On 24 February, most Russians awoke with little idea that Vladimir Putin had launched a full-scale war on Ukraine. As their alarms rang to signal the beginning of another morning routine, they rolled over, checked their phones, or switched their televisions to the morning’s news programmes. A flurry of notifications from Russian media in the early hours alerted them to Putin’s announcement that his forces had begun a ‘special military operation’, first in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, and then against ‘key military targets’ across Ukraine. Only those with access to VPNs, opposition-minded Telegram channels, and foreign news sources were confronted with the word ‘war’ and its destructive effects on the lives of Ukrainians.

In the first few weeks of the war, some Russians grappled with ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ strategies. Across Russia’s largest cities, tens of thousands of people gathered on central squares to voice their opposition to the war, holding placards which read ‘no to war’ and ‘khui voine‘—’fuck war’. Thousands have been arrested at anti-war protests since 24 February, with others thrown out of universities or removed from their jobs for posting images of the war on social media.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians decided to leave, hauling their belongings, children, and pets to Russia’s airports in search of safe haven in the Baltics, the Caucasus, Dubai, Turkey, and the West. Most foreign correspondents and local independent journalists also departed, their work crippled by a new law which effectively makes the use of the word ‘war’, or anything deemed to ‘discredit the armed forces of the Russian Federation’, punishable with a potential fifteen-year sentence.

But most Russians never considered leaving. They remain at home. On the streets of Moscow, where I’ve lived for the best part of the last five years, the war is barely visible, except for some additional police barriers around Pushkin Square. The real effects of sanctions are yet to be felt. In shopping centres dotted around central Moscow, some international chains, such as H&M, Zara and Ikea, shut their doors in the weeks after the war began. But McDonalds, which announced the suspension of its Russian operations, is still open in some parts of the city, in St Petersburg, and in the east of Russia. For now, Coca-Cola remains available in supermarkets and corner shops, though nobody is certain that deliveries will continue into the next few months.

The war, though lacking any real physical manifestation in Moscow, dominates thoughts and conversations. Unlike the now-cliched kitchen table discussions during the Soviet Union, today’s Muscovites chat about the war with friends and acquaintances publicly in bars and restaurants. In my local, the regulars sarcastically call the war ‘the special military operation’ and echo a popular Russian joke format: ‘who needs the DNR there—we’ve already got the DNR at home’. There’s been sardonic talk of punishing anyone who utters the word ‘war’ with an obligatory shot of khrenovukha.

These jokes are born out of a sense of resignation, of hopelessness. Many friends and acquaintances in Moscow do not support the war but feel powerless to do anything about it. For decades, Putin’s state project has fostered an ingrained apathy in the Russian population. Few Russians believe that political activism can ever lead to political change, or that protest and arrest will have any effect on those in the Kremlin halls of power. In response, Russians turn inwards, focussing on what they can control: themselves, their family, their personal lives. They seek to live not in opposition to the state, but ignoring it, building their lives at a comfortable distance from it.

Instead of jokes, the apathy of some friends and acquaintances has developed into a kind of information nihilism. They understand that Russian state media lies and distorts but they find it hard to accept the veracity of any sources of information. They are lost, battling against a flood of information and disinformation without the toolkit to separate lies from truth. One friend, a regular BBC Russian service reader whose company builds dachas in the Moscow region, told me: ‘I don’t listen to any of that shit in the news. I know our news is complete rubbish, but how do I know that your news isn’t, too?’

Others have begun to use Russian state media’s lies as a comfort blanket. It is difficult for people, in any war, to accept that one’s country is a belligerent, malicious actor. It is even more difficult for many Russians to accept that their army is committing atrocities in Ukraine, a country to which Russians have deep-rooted cultural, historical, and familial ties. Russian state media helps to jettison these difficulties, giving Russians permission to look away.

‘We are only targeting military infrastructure’, I heard a few times in conversations during the first days of the war, even from people who told me: ‘invading Ukraine is polniy pizdets‘—completely fucked up. When images emerged of the destruction of residential blocks in Kyiv and Kharkiv, the same people assured me that the buildings were ‘military targets’. When the world learned of the atrocities in Bucha, I had already left Moscow, perhaps temporarily, for Tbilisi. Those wrapped in their state media comfort blankets went quiet, refusing to engage. As the horrors increased, the comfort blanket became more appealing.

There are, of course, some Russians who avidly support the war. A friend of a friend from a town on the Volga, who I had interviewed for a piece a couple years ago, messaged me a few weeks into the war to ask if I was still in Russia. He told me that a ‘military solution was inevitable’, that Russia has ‘a duty to defend Russian speakers’, that the ‘drug-addled fascists in Kyiv have to be destroyed’. He sent me a picture of the now-infamous ‘Z’, which he had stuck to the rear windscreen of his car. Another friend, who had recently moved to Moscow from a town in Russia’s south, told me that she had posted a fairly bland anti-war message on Instagram, only to find her phone ringing seconds later. Her grandfather was on the other end of the line, berating her for speaking out against the war. He used a phrase which roughly translates as ‘you don’t turn on your own people’.

The ‘Z’ campaign, picked up feverishly by Western social media commentators, has yet to garner substantive support in Moscow. Some institutions, such as schools and hospitals, organised symbolic gestures of support for the ‘Z’ campaign, but it is unclear whether these were directed, done voluntarily, or were instances of state employees ‘working towards the Kremlin’, showing ostensible support now to avoid repression later. One friend, who works in finance, shared the WhatsApp chat for his daughter’s primary school class in north Moscow, with the teacher messaging parents to say that she wanted to organise a ‘Z’-themed show of support. One parent answered: ‘why are you politicising our children and this school?’ The teacher then restricted replies to the message, before deleting it entirely.

After the first month of war, Moscow remained calm. Some people had found new lives outside of Russia, others withdrew more intensely into the private lives they had built for themselves. Russian state media offered reassurances for the disbelieving and the guilt-ridden, while providing a clarion call to the war-thirsty. But this hazy, ethereal state is unlikely to last. In the coming months, as sanctions begin to bite, economic disaster is a real prospect. As ever, ordinary Russians will suffer while the corrupt elite use their pillaged wealth as insulation from the war they themselves launched.