FTA -- this really drives home the absolute lack of morality/ethics in Russian society:
RFE/RL: When you say that the public expects change, what is this public demand for change motivated by? Do they want something changed in order to win this war, or do they want to see the war end? What exactly does the Russian public want?
Gallyamov: If he manages to win the war, great. The public wants to [return] to the prewar state when everything was relatively peaceful. The rules of the game were relatively clear: no sanctions; [and] you could earn money here, and if you are sharing this money with Putin's elites, you’ll have no problem.
You are earning this money, you transfer it to the Western world, somewhere to France, to England, to America…. And then when you [take your] pension, you will spend the rest of your life somewhere in Florida or in some other nice places in the West. So this strategy was really clear. Now it came to an end. People don't understand why, because nobody believes in all this stuff about NATO, or Ukrainian fascists. Everybody understands that this was something which could easily have been avoided.
RFE/RL: So it's not morality that is at play here?
Gallyamov: No, no, no, no.
RFE/RL: So it's not "We don't want war because it's wrong." It's the material aspect of it: “We don’t want war because it's bad for business, bad for our standard of living.” Is that what drives the public?
Gallyamov: The main thing is [it's] not just bad for business, [but] because it threatens the regime with collapse. People really feel that if he doesn't change something, if he doesn't stop what he's doing now, it will ultimately lead to a revolution. And the whole system would collapse. And all of the elites, of course, they don't want this. They want stability.
And so, of course, it's not about morals and ethics. Russian elites are absolutely immoral; they're very practically minded. So if you could win the war and tighten the screws and make everything like it was before, great, but you can't win the war. And if you insist, [then] you will lead us to revolution. No, look, stop: You can't win the war. Let us do something else. Let us negotiate. Let's stop the war. Let’s end sanctions, let’s normalize the situation in the country. We don't want this [Kremlin-connected businessmen] Yevgeny Prigozhin with his hammer running around and threatening us. So this is the general feeling -- the situation has become absolutely abnormal. It's heading towards some kind of collapse. Nobody understands [what] this collapse would look [like]. But everybody feels that it's coming.