The Kremlin is grappling with the fallout from the viral spread of a celebrity blogger’s criticism of Russian authorities, as Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings register their sixth consecutive weekly decline.
Victoria Bonya, a household name in Russia who rose to fame in 2006 on Dom-2, the country’s answer to the reality TV show Big Brother, posted a video on Monday warning the Russian president that a string of mounting problems risked spiralling out of control.
“The people are afraid of you, artists are afraid, governors are afraid,” she said, in the 18-minute video on Instagram, which has garnered 26m views and more than 1.3m likes in the past four days.
She rattled off a list of issues she said no regional governor would dare raise with Putin directly: flooding in Dagestan, oil pollution along the Black Sea coast, livestock culls in Siberia, internet blackouts and a squeeze on small businesses from rising prices and taxes.
Victoria Bonya’s video lists numerous problems that she blames on the Kremlin’s poor governance. Photograph: victroriabonya/Instagram“You know what the risk is?” asked Bonya, who lives outside Russia. “That people will stop being afraid, and they’re being squeezed into a coiled spring, and that one day that coiled spring will shoot out.”
Moscow on Thursday took the unusual step of publicly acknowledging the sharp criticism, saying work was under way to address problems identified by Bonya.
The influencer’s comments notably stopped short of directly targeting Putin himself or the war in Ukraine, prompting speculation that the intervention may have been coordinated with Moscow to signal that public grievances are being heard before parliamentary elections later this year.
The approach fits a familiar Kremlin playbook: casting Putin as the “good tsar” kept in the dark by errant officials. The narrative has helped the president deflect blame for the country’s problems on to subordinates, preserving his personal standing even as discontent grows.
Political analysts, however, said the outburst was unlikely to have been coordinated, but rather reflected a spontaneous reaction to simmering discontent across the country.
“War fatigue is really starting to set in,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political scientist and author of a recent book on Putin’s ideology. “It is beginning to click in people’s minds that everything that is happening is a consequence of the war.”
Kolesnikov added that it had become increasingly difficult for the authorities to explain away the war’s impact on everyday life, from the economic slowdown to tightening internet restrictions.
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