“I don’t understand anything. Last week everything was normal in Moscow, and suddenly there is no gasoline and you have to wait an hour and a half in line.” This is how one of the people who attended a business meeting held last Thursday in Moscow expressed themselves. In the past year, the Kremlin has lost the approval it gained among Russians when it launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which boosted support for the president both for linking the country’s future to him and for the pride it sparked by challenging the West, three decades after the end of the Cold War.
The economic crisis and the increase in Ukrainian attacks have made half of the population today consider that the country is not going in the right direction, although no one expects protests. The Kremlin has repressed all opposition and three out of four Russians approve of their president despite his popularity having dropped. The situation is tense and the atmosphere, at times, pessimistic, and Vladimir Putin will have to carefully measure every step so that military wear or an economic debacle do not have unexpected consequences for his regime.
“Every day that passes everything is worse. We have the feeling that something is going to happen, but we don’t know what,” added the same businessman this week, lamenting that “neither Putin nor Ukraine will stop the war.”
All surveys, official and independent, show a similar picture of the country. Data from the reputable Levada polling center indicate that 52% of Russians believe their nation is “going in the right direction,” one of the lowest percentages of Putinism in almost two decades and the same level it had just before unleashing the war in February 2022. At the beginning of 2025, just before the overheated Russian economy began to fail and the slow advances on the front faded, this percentage reached 75%.
The crisis and the escalation of attacks on Russia have also slightly eroded Putin’s popularity. According to Levada, the approval of the Russian leader was around 76% in June, compared to 87% a year earlier.
Putin still enjoys the trust of an overwhelming majority of his citizens, but those around him do not. The government fails with an approval rating of 46%, while its party, United Russia, gets a meager 36%. Additionally, 62% of the population would start serious peace negotiations right now, despite not having achieved their objectives.
Russia is a country of contrasts, says a famous phrase, and four and a half years of war have accentuated this situation. In Moscow, a shopping mall is packed with products and luxury items, but outside dozens of cars queue to fill their tanks due to fuel shortages. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have died in the largest European invasion seen by generations, while hundreds of thousands more travel on vacation as if the fighting were a dream.
Something else has changed this year. People have lost the shame of speaking out loud about the poor economic situation, corruption, or their fear of a hypothetical mobilization. The silence was broken by several influencers in spring. The Federal Security Service [FSB]’s decision to test a total internet blockade on mobile phones against the presidential administration’s opinion was the last straw in a glass mainly filled by Russians’ economic problems. Military production has suffocated the civilian industry and inflation has soared, eating into salaries artificially inflated by war spending.
“We will not win this war of attrition. We deceive ourselves by believing that everything [in Ukraine] will collapse. It has not collapsed nor will it collapse. Our costs are increasing. Losses from attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces against our infrastructure, ports, oil and gas, chemical complexes, logistics, are increasingly greater,” warned Andrei Klepach in May, then chief economist of VEB, the Russian Development Bank, and formerly deputy minister of Economic Development between 2008 and 2014. When his statements leaked this month, he was dismissed from his position.
Russians tolerate the consequences of attacks on their pockets worse than the bombings themselves, except in heavily affected regions like the border Belgorod, which has more than five hundred victims. Ukraine has resumed its attacks on Russian refineries and supply problems at gas stations have reappeared. It is not a collapse, but it forces Russia to import fuel from India, twice as expensive.
Kiev has also targeted giants of distribution and online commerce, in whose facilities hundreds of thousands of retailers store their products. Ukrainian forces have launched at least 24 attacks this summer against the warehouses of Wildberries, an e-commerce giant, and this Saturday they bombed for the first time the facilities of its rival Ozon.
“Wildberries is on the brink of bankruptcy,” business sources told this newspaper. “And no one will take responsibility for the merchants’ losses. It’s a hard blow,” they added.
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Putin, who has promised to rebuild the company’s facilities, admitted this week that these attacks do not have “serious consequences” but “undoubtedly harm” the country.
“The country is on the brink of recession,” an analyst pointed out. “The hole in the budgets is getting bigger, revenue is falling, it is not sustainable.” Loan payments consume more than 8% of the Russian budget, to which another 40% of military and police spending must be added. With the economy worsening, the government acknowledged this year that it is considering cuts in “dispensable” areas. That is, social aid and infrastructure investment.
Besides the crisis, the second concern floating at the cocktails was the feared mobilization. Although most doubted it would happen, as it would greatly strain the relationship between the Kremlin and society.
Waiting for the elections
In Russia, there is a belief that the legislative elections to be held from September 18 to 20 will be a turning point after which Putin will announce severe decisions to try to unblock a stalled war. In particular, a new mobilization of the population.
“We do not need a massive mobilization at this time. It is not planned nor expected, as far as I know,” said Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, this week.
But a series of signs has unleashed nervousness. Voluntary recruitment figures began to drop significantly since last year, although they have rebounded in summer; new recruitment training grounds have been built and Putin has signed a series of decrees that facilitate mobilization.
On the other hand, authorities have intensified covert recruitment. Military service, the mili, is mandatory in Russia. In regions like Penza, raids are taking place on the streets to check citizens’ papers and try to force them to sign a contract with the army. Some men hide in their homes, and videos of women blocking the bus their husbands were forced to board have gone viral. Likewise, universities instruct professors to promise their lagging students that they will pass if they enlist in the armed forces.
While it is true that the Russian army has managed to reinforce itself these years by recruiting soldiers with huge salaries, it is also clear that the budget does not allow for more. And no one in Russia trusts. Moscow denied it would invade Ukraine until the day before the attack, and Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, assured in September 2022 that there would be no mobilization in Russia.
This Saturday, Putin has framed the elections as a plebiscite on his plans. “They will be the expression of the common will of millions of Russians. They will confirm the stability of the state, the maturity of our political system and its ability to withstand any external threat, blackmail or aggression,” he said at the congress of his party, United Russia.
In reality, they are inconsequential elections. The moderate opposition, like Boris Nadezhdin or the Yabloko party, has been banned, and in the lower house only Putin’s formation and loyal parties that always approve without a single vote against what the Kremlin demands have presence. For the presidential administration, these elections are just a way to show institutional normality.
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