Waiting for her friends on Moscow’s primly landscaped Boulevard Ring this week, Svetlana Kozakova admitted that she’d had a sleepless night. She kept checking the news on her phone after President Vladimir Putin’s aggrieved speech to the nation Monday that all but threatened Ukraine with war.
"Things are going to be very, very uncertain,” she said, "and, most likely, very sad.”
For months, Russians of all political stripes tuned out U.S. warnings that their country could soon invade Ukraine, dismissing them as an outlandish concoction in the West’s disinformation war with the Kremlin. But this week, after several television appearances by Putin stunned and scared some longtime observers, that sense of casual disregard turned into a deep unease.