Thread by @samagreene

Anti-war protests in Russia do not appear to be waning. Per @OvdInfo, a further 2700 arrests today in 51 cities, bringing the total number of arrests since the invasion to nearly 6k.

https://twitter.com/ovdinfo/status/1498042478552829958

Protests appear smaller than the Jan/Feb 2021 protests around Navalny’s arrest, but maybe not by much (good numbers are hard to come by). And the more frequently we see scenes like 👇, the bigger they’ll get.

The real question, though, is when scenes like the one above begin to interact with scenes like the one below, where people queue to get money out of their bank accounts:

For the moment, these are two different groups of people, and two different ways of coping with the same problem. Those coping strategies stem from differing understandings of the source of the problem, and of effective solutions. Those cognitive gaps are hard to overcome.

One thing that can bridge those cognitive gaps, though, is emotion — a factor that is increasingly central to my thinking about where this crisis goes from here.

Emotion is key to the response of the Ukrainian public, to the momentum of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, to the galvanizing of the western response, and to the reaction of Russian citizens and elites.

So when you look at the hard facts — and we should look at the hard facts — it’s an analytical mistake to try to divorce them from emotions. Facts shape behavior through emotion. Emotions, in fact, _are_ facts.

To be continued.