Global Voices’ Civic Media Observatory analyzed discussions on social media to find out what Russian citizens were saying about the phrases “War,” “Putin,” and the letter “Z” This article features research and data from Global Voices’ Civic Media Observatory. In today’s Russia, social networks are one of the few places where public discussions continue, the only “public spheres,” using the meaning that Habermas attached to them. In other words, social networks remain one of the few places where public opinion can be formed and where access for many citizens exists. In the absence of organized opposition, independent media, and elections, discussions on social networks are often the only way to get a glimpse into “public” opinion, or at least that of the users. It is unwise to trust official polls conducted by Russian government-sponsored sociological agencies such as WCIOM, a state-owned polling company that provides regular but suspect public opinion surveys. Last week, WCIOM reported that 68 percent of the population supported Russia’s so-called “special operation,” otherwise known as Russia’s war against Ukraine, while only 22 percent were against the war. But Russian polls are notoriously inaccurate, and Russian respondents may also be commenting on the war they see on Russian TV, which does not reflect the war happening on the ground in Ukraine. Soon, Russians may only have three social networks to use inside the country: VKontakte (23 million users per month), Odnoklassinki (5.1 million users per month, data from autumn 2021), and Livejournal (less than 7,000 users with over 1,000 subscribers at the moment, although it used to be a very popular blogger platform in Russia in the 2000s). On March 14, Instagram was fully blocked in Russia, while Facebook and Twitter were already blocked, under the pretext that Meta is an “extremist” organization that allows calls for the “death” of the Russian leader. YouTube is currently allowed but may be blocked by Roskomnadzor in a matter of days. Russian Internet users without VPNs will soon be left with Vkontakte, LiveJournal, and Odnoklassniki and that’s about it. Pretty grim. (Telegram isn’t threatened yet, but I think it’s only a matter of time.) — Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) March 11, 2022 Both VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki are controlled by the state. VKontakte’s director, Vladimir Kirienko, is the son of the deputy head of Putin’s administration, Sergey Kirienko; both face Western sanctions. VK’s API, which allows third parties to extract and analyze data, was a copycat of Facebook in 2006, and at the moment remains open for developers and researchers. In addition, there are no algorithmic mechanisms to monitor and censor comments: VK is organized by groups and personal pages, and users are responsible for comments on their pages. Many media on VK, lacking the resources to monitor comments and fearing punishment by VK or Roskomnadzor, have shut down the option to comment. This is especially true of officially registered media sources, such as the Yekaterinburg-based media outlet, 66.ru, but not by unofficial, unlicensed media communities. There is a widely held opinion in Russia among those critical of Putin’s regime that VK’s users represent those people who support Putin, and view the world through propaganda glasses, and that VK collaborates with the FSB. VK is however very popular in Russia. According to a 2021 report by Brand Analytics, VK’s Russian-speaking users posted the largest number of messages per month, with over 408 million, while the number of active authors was second only to that of Instagram, with 23.8 million. Given the likelihood that VK’s API will be closed for further research, Global Voices investigated the opinions of VKontakte users on the Russian war with Ukraine, the actions of the Russian government, sanctions, and users’ opinions about President Putin in regional VK groups during the first week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We scraped Vkontakte through their API and analyzed comments from 18 pages of “VK communities” in various regions of Russia, focusing on large cities. These so-called “typical” communities post news, photos, and stories of everyday life in the city. Our analysis included comments on the last 10 stories, memes, or photos connected to the Russian war with Ukraine or its consequences, including international sanctions and actions of the Russian government. We scraped on March 10 and collected stories from March 4–8. There were over 21,000 comments in total. A downloadable link to the list of news stories is available here. We ran a computational text analysis which included finding word and phrase frequencies.