Unlike the residents of Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Odessa, on February 24, Muscovites did not hear explosions in their city. Russian citizens learned about the outbreak of war, which the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry described as “an attempt to prevent a global war,” from the news.

The president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, sounded confident that “Russians will support the operation in Ukraine just as they supported the recognition of the DNR and LNR,” referring to the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics. But on the evening of the first day of the war, several thousand Muscovites gathered on Tverskaya Street to express their disagreement with him. The police blocked Pushkin Square, but people moved in fairly dense crowds along the boulevards, Tverskaya, and the surrounding alleys. Young faces predominated.

The same young faces prevailed ten years ago on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue during the anti-Putin protests of 2011–12. But the atmosphere has changed radically over the years. In 2012, the “angry citizens” were proud of their gushing “creativity”: hundreds of slogans, banners, and chants. Their authors were competing in wit. Now people mostly moved in silence. They chanted a single slogan: “No to War!” At least 955 people were detained in the evening.