While some prominent Russian commentators expressed similar outrage on government-run television channels, many more sympathized with the cadets, and made videos of their own in support of them. Most were from other groups of students at trade schools for farmers, construction workers and emergency services, but the Russian women's biathlon team also made one. A Ukrainian swim club filmed part of its video underwater, and a group of retired women living in a St. Petersburg communal apartment contributed their own. Russian American journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker that the videos were an unexpected and widespread protest against the state's anti-LGBT policies. "Each clip is at once a show of solidarity with a group of young strangers and a show of ordinary people’s ability to organize and act together—an ability that the state would seem to have stamped out."
