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MOSCOW Paediatrician Olga Alekseyeva could not stop crying after Vladimir Putins declaration of war against Ukraine she cried most of Thursday. The war was her personal tragedy, she told i, though she was not in Ukraine but in the northern Russian city of St Petersburg. She was convinced that any sane Russian felt the same way.

And many did. In solidarity with Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta came out in two languages on Thursday, in Russian and Ukrainian. More than 100 Russian journalists protested on social media: War has never been and never will be a solution to any conflict, there is no justification, reporters declared.

But millions of Russians felt completely indifferent, ignoring the devastation and panic in their neighbouring country. Restaurants, coffee shops, galleries and theatres were full of visitors on Thursday, as if it were a normal night both in St Petersburg and in Moscow.

Figures from pop culture tried to puncture the bubble, with a dozen of the countrys most prominent pop stars speaking out against the war.

And Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, chief editor of Russias only independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, said in a video address that there was nobody in Moscow who could stop the war, because President Putin was spinning the nuclear button in his hand like an expensive key chain.

There was only one way out of this overwhelming feeling of shame, he said, a powerful anti-war movement all across Russia. According to Levada Centres social polls, 61 per cent of Russians lived with a constant fear of war this year, and the majority did not want the one against Ukraine. But the Kremlin did not pay attention to public opinion.

Neither sanctions nor the freezing of the Russian elites assets have been able to stop the war, so far. Russian authorities continued to insist that demilitarisation of Ukraine was the only solution the Kremlin had left and blamed all violence on Ukraine.

Sometimes I think that Putin and Russians speak different languages he lives in his bunker moving chess pieces around and we save money, think of how not to die from hunger and stock up on buckwheat, Moscow university professor Veronika Petrovna told i on Thursday.

Russian opposition party Yabloko collected signatures under a petition against the war. The number of people signing our petition has jumped from about 26,000 names last night to more than 40,000 today, the local deputy from Saint Petersburg, Boris Vishnevsky, told i, as Russian tanks broke the state border in Kyiv region on Thursday afternoon.

We have been warning Russians about the coming war for a year but unfortunately, very few listened to us.

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Putin moves his chess pieces while we try not to die of hunger: What Russians think about Ukraine invasi - iNews