In a country like Russia, where the media is tightly controlled, it can be difficult to know what ordinary people think. However, independent polls of public opinion are periodically conducted. If you follow them over the years, you can understand how Russia is changing in a war that has lasted much longer than the Kremlin promised.

Tatiana Stanova, a senior fellow at Carnegie Russia’s Eurasian Center, analyzed the survey in an essay for Foreign Affairs.

She writes that before the invasion, only 8 percent of Russians said they openly admired Vladimir Putin, while 48 percent said they wanted him re-elected in 2024.

Now these figures are 19% and 68%, respectively. In fact, all parts of the establishment are now more popular than before the war, Sky News quotes.

From an internal point of view in Russia, one might think that the war worked.

However, war fatigue seems to be setting in

In a survey conducted by the Levada Center in May of this year, 45% of respondents believed that the war would last more than a year, but 12 months earlier this proportion was only one in five.

Vladimir Putin (Photo: Aleksey Nikolskyi/Kremlin Pool / Zuma Press / Profimedia)

Increases anti-elitist sentiments

That frustration and fatigue was one of the sparks for a brief revolt by Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in June.

Well-respected at the time, he raged against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Army Chief Valery Gerasimov, saying he would go further and faster to win the war.

“Anti-elitist sentiments also contributed to the rise of Prigozhin,” Stanova writes.

“The Russians saw the capture of Bakhmut by the Wagnerites in May as the most important event of that month,” she says.

At the beginning of 2022, Prigozhin was ranked 158th in the ranking of the most trusted Russian political figures. Bakhmut catapulted him into the top five, but he is still inferior to Vladimir Putin.

However, his personal popularity fell significantly during his march to Moscow, as did Shoigu’s, according to a Levada poll in late June.

Putin’s power is weaker than expected

Stanovaya adds: “The uprising of the mercenary commander did not inspire Russians against a state in trouble, but rather frightened them with the prospect of destabilization and disorder.”

This signaled that Putin’s power is weaker than expected.

Drone attacks on parts of Moscow have caused public concern since they began in May. Ukraine has not taken responsibility for them, but they create a wrong image. After all, how can you win a war if you can’t protect your own capital?

A quick scan of Russian social media showed that people had genuine questions about how the attack was allowed to happen.

Head of Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin (Photo: Not specified / WillWest News / Profimedia)

There is a contradiction

How can confidence in Putin be as strong as ever when there are voices talking about his weakness?

Analysts say Putin’s inner circle and security services may seek to assert greater control, becoming more repressive and brutal to avoid any potential for chaos and unrest.

In fact, it could encourage him to redouble his actions against the opposition rather than soften it. We’ve already seen it this year, when the number of treason cases is expected to be higher than in the last 20 years combined.

We are also witnessing a change of pace in Putin’s public persona. The strongman, who was famously photographed shirtless on a horse in 2009, was photographed in Dagestan a week after the uprising, holding children, hugging people and posing for selfies.

Stanovaya says that while Putin may have wanted to rehabilitate his image through Dagestan, “many observers interpreted the spectacle as a sign of the president’s desperate need to feel the support of Russian citizens — perhaps a measure of his own sense of vulnerability.”

Of course, it is almost impossible to know exactly how events inside Russia have changed. The country is too isolated to know for sure.

But the symptoms of change can still be read in what the world is allowed to see.

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