Having read my fair share of articles there is a surprising amount of much-'liked' comments on quite prominent newspapers which seem to come straight out of the Kremlin, with a free use of 'Nazi', 'fascists' and so forth. In some occasions other posters commented that the writer stucking to the Kremlin line had only joined very recently and devoted all of his posts to the Ukrainian crisis. I don't doubt that there is a fair number of guys working out of their own initiative but if we consider that the Kremlin has also payed Russian 'tourists', 'self-defense' forces, and funded anti-Western protesters it seems very unlikely that we don't see much of the same in Cyberspace.

Exactly this need to pay for most of the supporting actions is a quite striking difference to the vastly bottom-up nature of the Ukrainian maidan movement. Then again this has been the general political problem, as I have mentioned before, for Putin relative to the West, especially in regard to eastern European countries. The European attraction is a massive, vastly natural headwind for Russia in this struggle. It has to work very hard, with all sorts of clever actions, just to not lose ground.