It was only with his brother’s death, Mr. Kononov, 32, said in a phone interview, that he started paying attention to the war raging just over 50 miles from his home. And he realized, he said, that his brother had died in a war that “no one needs.”

“If everyone learns everything, there will be protests,” Mr. Kononov, who works in a freight business, said, referring to the awareness of the Russian public at large. “And I think that would be for the best. Because this war has to stop. There ought to be no wars at all.”…

For others, though, the grim news of casualties is only hardening a determination to defeat Ukraine and support Mr. Putin’s conflict with the West.

“If America didn’t supply weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, then there would be no deaths of our young guys,” Aleksandr Chernykh, who lost his 22-year-old son, Luka Chernykh, a corporal in military intelligence, said in a phone interview. “My personal opinion is we should just whack America with a nuclear bomb and that’s it, so that they stop getting involved in other countries’ business.”