This document is a support reference for Ukrainian communicators, civic society representatives, and journalists who engage regularly with Western partners.
During the Cold War, Western liberals drew a firm distinction between the Soviet state and the Soviet people. The state was the oppressor; the people were its victims. This was partly accurate — genuine dissident movements existed — but it hardened into a reflex that survived the Cold War completely unchanged. After 1991, the West never updated the framework. The default assumption became permanent: the state is always the problem, the people are always separate from it.
After 1991, the dominant Western story was that Russia had been liberated — from communism, from empire, from its own authoritarian history. The 'good Russians' of that era were Yeltsin, the oligarchs, the Western-educated technocrats. Russia was on a journey toward becoming like us. Western journalists, diplomats, and academics built careers on this story and had a professional stake in Russia being reformable.
Ukraine, in this framework, was mostly a subplot of Russia's democratic transition — not a nation with its own trajectory and its own right to exist independently.
The West spent 200 years absorbing Russian literature, music, and art. This created a powerful psychological equation: great culture equals civilised people equals fundamentally redeemable nation. Russia understood this and cultivated it deliberately. Soviet cultural diplomacy — the Bolshoi on tour, chess champions, the Nobel Prize for Pasternak — was a sophisticated soft power operation.
Putin inherited that capital and has spent it carefully. When major Western cultural institutions welcomed Russian artists back after one sentence of condemnation, they were not staying above politics. They were participating in a strategy 200 years in the making.
Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Brodsky, Pussy Riot, Navalny — the West has always maintained a gallery of heroic Russian dissenters as proof that 'real Russia' opposes the regime. But the scale question was consistently obscured. Dissidents were always a tiny minority. Navalny's support in Russia, even at his peak, was in the low single digits.
The moral heroism of individuals was being used to represent an entire society — without asking what the rest believed. And even Navalny himself never renounced Crimea as Ukrainian territory — he called it a question for a referendum, implicitly accepting the legitimacy of the annexation.
There is a deep European discomfort — particularly in Germany and France — with the idea that an entire people can bear responsibility for what their state does. That logic, applied to 20th century European history, leads to deeply uncomfortable places. The 'it's the leadership, not the people' framework is partly a way of protecting European societies from their own historical mirror.
If you accept that Russian society bears collective moral responsibility for broadly supporting this war, you implicitly accept a framework that could be applied to European societies' own pasts. The 'good Russians' argument is therefore, unconsciously, also a form of European self-protection.
Germany's dependency on Russian gas, European corporate investment in Russia, the City of London's management of Russian oligarch wealth — these created powerful incentives to maintain the fiction that Russia was a normal country with a difficult leader, rather than an imperial state pursuing imperial goals.
'Good Russians' was also good business. The framework that separated Russian society from Russian state violence was enormously convenient for those with economic stakes in the relationship continuing. Moral nuance and financial interest pointed in exactly the same direction — and for twenty years, no one looked too carefully at that coincidence.
The Levada Center — a Moscow-based sociological institute regularly cited by Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Financial Times — has consistently recorded support for the military operation above 70% across all measurements from 2022 to 2026, ranging between 72 and 82 percent, in anonymous surveys conducted inside Russia. Many respondents have relatives in Ukraine and access to VPNs. The 'they don't know the truth' argument does not hold against those numbers.
The LingvaLexa study surveyed 1,060 Russian POWs held in Ukraine — properly fed, treated under international law, not under duress — and found that 43% rated Ukrainians as less than fully human, and nearly a third said they want to return and fight again. These are not officials or ideologues. They are ordinary Russians — the very civil society the West is being asked to protect.
The 'good Russians' narrative is not primarily a factual claim. It is a psychological and political function. It allows Western audiences to avoid revising decades of investment in Russia; to keep the solution manageable — remove Putin — rather than structural; to preserve existing relationships; and to avoid the moral discomfort of accepting that mass atrocity can have broad popular support in a country they thought they understood.
Ukraine has been paying the price for that psychological convenience since at least 2014. The cost is not abstract. It is measured in political will, delayed weapons, and softened sanctions.