Mood in Russia turns bleak as war in Ukraine drags on and economy suffers
President Vladimir Putin is facing rising discontent across Russian society as the war against Ukraine drags on, the economy flounders and public dissatisfaction mounts over government restrictions on internet access.
Russia’s biggest state-owned pollster, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, on Friday recorded that Putin’s approval rating fell to 65.6 percent, its lowest level since before the beginning of the war and a drop of 12.2 percentage points since the start of the year.
Gauging genuine public opinion is difficult under an authoritarian regime that exiles, imprisons or even kills political opponents and where criticism of the war is illegal, but compared with Putin’s historical ratings — as high as 88 percent — the falling poll numbers signal growing weariness with the war now in its fifth year, and with negotiations to end it largely stalled as the Trump administration focuses on Iran.
Economic sanctions are biting ever deeper into Russia’s economy, hitting pocketbooks, and the government’s push to limit access to the internet, citing security concerns, is rankling a society that long enjoyed a high level of digitalization.
“The overall mood is that’s enough already; you’ve been fighting for long enough,” said one Russian official, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “It seems to everyone that it’s been going on for longer than World War II, the Great Patriotic War — and at the same time we can’t even take one region,” the official said, referring to Russia’s failed effort since the full-scale invasion in 2022 to take full control of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.
In recent weeks, Putin’s government has faced unusually open and strident criticism from members of Russia’s financial elite over its handling of the economy, which contracted by 1.8 percent in the first two months of the year as tougher sanctions and high interest rates intended to combat inflation continue to choke investment and led nonpayments of commercial bills to reach a record high of $109 billion in January, according to Rosstat, Russia’s Federal Statistics Service. The number of companies owing taxes to the government, meanwhile, has climbed to 439,900, according to Aktion Accounting, a Russian firm. [Continue reading…]