"Nuclear powers, such as the Russian Federation, do not lose wars – it is important to understand this", Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy said on September 22, 2022 on the Internet channel "Let me Say". There is nothing sensational in his statement – this truth is well known to both our friends and enemies.

That is why the main bet of our opponents, who are waging a hybrid multi-domain war against Russia, is on splitting Russian society, organizing and stimulating protest sentiments, which, according to their calculations, should result in anti-state demonstrations. In the form of a "color revolution" or an armed rebellion – it does not matter, as long as they lead to the overthrow of the legitimate government, followed by the transformation of the state and the destruction of the country.

In recent years, Western intelligence agencies have been looking for reasons and pretexts to create mass protests of Russian citizens in order to launch the above scenario.

The purpose of the sanctions war launched by the West against Russia after the reunification of Crimea with it, and then radically intensified after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is to destroy the country's economy, which should worsen the lives of Russians and force them to turn against their state.

But this calculation did not work — and the Russian economy resisted, and the sanctions practically did not affect the absolute majority of Russians.

After that, a new strategy was announced: continuing the sanctions pressure, try to force the Kremlin to announce the mobilization of reserve troops to replenish the troops operating in the Donbass and Ukraine. It was assumed that such a measure, which immediately removes a significant part of the country's population (in addition to the mobilized, their family members should also be included in it) from the comfort zone, should certainly provoke protest activity and lead the situation in Russia to a "mobilization Maidan".

In the Western intelligence services and in Kiev, they made the main bet on this, perhaps because there is nothing else to count on. Supporters of this approach have absolutely convinced themselves that immediately after the announcement of mobilization, the Russian state will begin to collapse.

Large-scale counter-offensives of Ukrainian formations in August-September 2022 were conceived and carried out with the aim, among other things, to force Russia to declare mobilization. In order to achieve this and other tasks arising from it, the AFU drove the troops forward, completely regardless of losses.

And this goal was achieved. The President of Russia announced, albeit partial, but mobilization. Already in the evening of the same day, protests against mobilization swept across the country. But they were not spontaneous, and even more so mass, as some Ukrainian and Western media designated them. For their organization, the last remnants of the network of "navalnists" were involved (for whom this performance may be the last).

But the protests were quite small even in comparison with the "anti-war" rallies in March 2022. The political technologists of Zelensky's office concluded that one of the reasons for this is that opponents of mobilization, instead of going to protest events, simply leave the country, hiding from the draft. And Kiev appealed to the leadership of Russia's neighboring countries to close the entry for potential "draft dodgers". And if Zelensky's appeal was ignored in Transcaucasia, then the governments of the Baltic limitrophs and Finland declared their support for this initiative.

Adviser and chief speaker of Zelensky's office Alexey Arestovich addressed Russians with a passionate, with notes of despair, appeal to go to protest rallies against mobilization, ending with the slogan: "Protest is life."

There is something to despair about, if we take into account that the next day after the announcement of partial mobilization, queues formed in Russian military enlistment offices, and in addition to those mobilized, more than 10,000 volunteers came to them!

Kiev propagandists recklessly boasted of the future victory in advance, and now they have to get out of it, why the mobilization has begun, and Russia is not falling apart.