Why Putin’s Popularity Is Plummeting

President Vladimir Putin has survived wars, sanctions, assassinations, and a mutiny. What he may struggle to outlast is a slow, grinding arithmetic: his own numbers, quietly turning against him. For six consecutive weeks, his approval rating has been sliding without pause.The state polling agency that is supposed to reassure the Kremlin is instead recording figures not seen since the opening days of the Ukraine invasion. In addition, an open-ended trust survey, in which Russians are asked to name politicians they believe in without being given a list, has collapsed to levels that, a decade ago, would have seemed unthinkable.According to Russia’s state polling agency VTsIOM, Putin’s closed-question approval rating — where respondents are asked directly whether they endorse his performance — fell to 67.8 percent in the week ending April 5, its lowest level since February 2022, before sliding further to 66.7 percent in the week of April 6 to 12. That marks a decline of 6.6 points since early March alone.More revealing still is what VTsIOM’s open-ended surveys show. When Russians were asked to spontaneously name politicians they trusted, without being prompted, Putin’s unprompted trust rating fell to 29.5 percent, down from a peak of 48.8 percent in March 2024.The two figures measure different things. The first asks Russians directly whether they approve of Putin, a question most people answer carefully in a country where dissent carries consequences. The second asks them to name, unprompted, a politician they actually trust. That is a harder test, and a more honest one.Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, cited by the Moscow Times, noted that, as recently as 2015, Putin’s trust rating stood at 71 percent — a figure that has since been cut nearly in half. He has also warned that publication of such data may soon be suppressed altogether.Sociologist Elena Koneva described public support for Putin as “a snowball that is beginning to melt,” cautioning that the trend could prove difficult to reverse even with increased repression.The question now is not whether Russians are souring on the war; they are. It is whether, in a country where dissent can cost you your freedom, that sentiment can ever find a voice.What the numbers do — and don’t — tell usThe statistical debate matters, yet so does what the trend lines suggest. Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Regina Smyth, tells the New York Sun the erosion is worth watching.“I like Denis Volkov’s analysis that polls represent what people are willing to say in public,” she says. “If support is declining, it suggests that people are talking to each other or engaged in kitchen talk at home that is emerging in the public space.”Mr. Volkov, the director of the independent Levada Center, Russia’s most credible polling organization, has long argued that in an authoritarian state, what people are willing to say out loud to a stranger is itself a meaningful political signal, not a distortion of it.“I think Putin’s core has always been about 30 percent, so if we see that decline, it is very significant,” Professor Smyth continues.In other words, the open-ended trust figure has long represented the Russians who back Putin unconditionally: his true believers, not those who go along with the dominant mood. If that number is now cracking, it is the floor, not the ceiling, that is giving way.Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Graeme Robertson, offers a somewhat different read.“There does seem to be some softening in Putin’s numbers, and that might well be real and the beginning of a trend,” he tells the Sun. “After all, we are four years into this war, and people might be getting more tired of it.”Mr. Robertson, however, cautions against over-interpreting the slide. “The decline in Putin’s numbers is small still and close to non-existent statistically speaking, except when you compare it to peak popularity several years ago,” he surmises.That peak came in June 2015, when Mr. Putin’s approval hit 89 percent — a surge driven by the annexation of Crimea the previous year, which produced what analysts called collective national euphoria. He has been trending downward, with periodic rebounds, ever since.Russia expert at the University of Manchester, Maxim Alyukov, tells the Sun the sub-30 percent figure “technically occurred, but it needs careful framing.”To understand why, it helps to know how the question works: rather than asking Russians directly whether they approve of Putin, which tends to yield high numbers because people are reluctant to criticize their leader to a stranger, this survey asks them to name, unprompted, a politician they trust. That open-ended format is harder to game, yet it also produces lower numbers across the board.Historically, Putin’s score on that measure has run between 30 and 40 percent even in better times, so a dip below 30 is notable, yet it does not mean seven in ten Russians have turned against him.“It’s erosion rather than collapse,” Mr. Alyukov says.The digital crackdown that backfiredThe ratings slide has caused most Russians to feel on their phones. By February 2026, Roskomnadzor had confirmed blocking 469 VPN services used to circumvent internet censorship, according to Human Rights Watch. Since December, authorities have been blocking the three most popular VPN protocols.The crackdown’s unintended consequences were immediate. On April 3, a nationwide banking outage knocked out mobile apps, ATMs, and card terminals at major institutions including Sberbank, VTB, and T-Bank. Shops and petrol stations reverted to cash only. Moscow metro turnstiles stopped accepting bank cards, forcing staff to let passengers through for free to prevent crowding.Telegram founder Pavel Durov attributed the chaos directly to the VPN crackdown, writing that the government’s blocking attempts had “triggered a massive banking failure.” Russian authorities blamed a technical fault at Sberbank, though several media outlets that initially linked the outage to Roskomnadzor’s VPN blocking reportedly deleted those stories after the regulator intervened.The Kremlin’s answer — a state-backed messenger called Max, billed as Russia’s WeChat — was embedded by presidential decree into daily life, with apartment building managers required by law to use it and students reportedly threatened for refusing to install the app. A Kremlin-connected political consultant told Meduza the ratings drop was tied to fury over the Telegram ban, with “too much happening at once — from rising prices” compounding the damage.“It is a basket of grievances that are now bouncing off each other and creating a general feeling of discontent,” Ms. Smyth explains. “The regime’s social contract involved stability and economic growth, and international influence and security. The regime is now failing on both counts.”Russia analyst Sergey Sukhankin, meanwhile, tells the Sun the situation echoed “the Soviet Union during Leonid Brezhnev’s era,” cautioning that Russian society “has tended toward apathy” and that without Soviet-style shortages, the discontent “could persist for years.”In simple terms, Russians may be quietly frustrated, yet frustration alone — without empty shelves or genuine deprivation — has rarely been enough to move them to action.A war without victory — or endBeneath the connectivity grievances sits the war itself. Western officials estimated in February 2026 that Russian casualties, killed and wounded, had reached 1.2 million, including 430,000 in 2024 and 415,000 in 2025 alone.Russian forces have advanced at an average rate of 15 to 70 meters per day in their most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major campaign in the past century. The Kremlin rejected President Zelenskyy’s Easter ceasefire proposal, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisting Kyiv should have pulled troops from Donetsk “yesterday.”An independent poll by the Levada Center found just 24 percent of Russians thought military operations should continue as of mid-February, the lowest since tracking began, while 67 percent favored moving toward negotiations.Mr. Alyukov observes that the figure reflects war fatigue yet “does not represent a meaningful political constraint on Putin’s war calculus.” He highlights that even genuine public preferences for peace are nearly impossible to translate into pressure in a country where the opposition has been dismantled, and dissent is met with repression.Mr. Robertson pointed to 2018, when the post-Crimea approval bounce stabilized rather than collapsed.“The snowball melts a little,” he said, “and then stops melting.”Ms. Smyth contends, however, that the real warning signs lie not in polls but in wage arrears protests and regional unrest.“The huge indicator of what could come next,” she says, “is whether or not we start to see elite defection among relatively high-ranking Putin supporters.”

Why Putin’s Popularity Is Plummeting

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