Why the mood is darkening in Putin’s Russia ...Middle East

Setbacks on the battlefield, rising inflation, a war-weary population and a military parade without much military hardware – no wonder Vladimir Putin appears to be reducing his public appearances.

Vladimir Putin and Kremlin elites are facing rising discontent across Russia thanks to a combination of geopolitical, economic and social pressures.

Years of sanctions, rising interest rates, sky-high inflation and continuing Ukrainian hits on energy facilities are forcing the Kremlin to make tough decisions, pitting security hawks against economic elites in the face of rising public discontent. Last month, Putin himself acknowledged that the economy was in trouble.

But it appears to be the Kremlin’s more recent crackdown on internet usage and messaging apps that has prompted a surge in public expressions of anger across society.

Russia’s recent crackdowns on cyber freedoms and the apparent drive towards a Chinese-style state-controlled internet have affected the lives of ordinary Russians who are already suffering from years of war and sanctions. Even among pro-government outlets and the elite, criticism of internet restrictions is growing.

The Russian government has in recent months expanded internet restrictions to unprecedented levels, with mobile internet regularly shut down across the country, allegedly to combat Ukrainian drone attacks.

Kremlin security and military advisers are wary of what happened to the leadership in Moscow’s ally Iran where security breaches through internet applications are thought to have led directly to key regime leaders being assassinated by the US and Israel.

But shifts in public mood present real problems for the Russian president. On Friday, even a state-owned pollster, the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, showed Putin’s approval ratings had fallen to 65.6 per cent, their lowest level since the start of the war, down 12 percentage points since the start of 2026.

Internet crackdown angering ordinary Russians

The war in Ukraine and years of sanctions have had a galvanising effect on Russian society, and any misstep from the authorities could create enough public upset to destroy the prevailing mood, according to Dr Anna Matveeva, visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London’s Russia Institute.

“I think that the internet disruption is the kind of mistake which can create a bigger internal effect, more than Ukraine or rising prices, because it’s something which affects everybody irrespective of social class or income”, she told The i Paper.

The crackdowns on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and the drive to create a government-backed alternative called Max as part of a digital firewall separating Russians from the West modelled on Chinese systems, risks putting security interests ahead of economic concerns.

“There is the economic block of the civilian part of the government which says ‘we invested into a digital economy we have made very good progress now it’s all kind of being undermined’ and the security people saying ‘look what happened to Iran how the leadership was decapitated because there was surveillance through internet chat groups’.

“It’s not unique to Russia but it’s a balance of how much you undermine freedoms to provide security and when does it get too much,” said Matveeva.

Ksenia Maximova, founder and director of the UK based Russian Democratic Society, told The i Paper: “People are actually way more annoyed about it than I expected. When your freedoms are taken away bit by bit it’s like when you boil a frog slowly and it doesn’t jump out, and I felt like at this point almost nothing would make people budge, but actually the internet crackdowns really did.”

And the impact for many ordinary Russians, already struggling to get by, may be too much. The independent Russian news site Meduza, citing a political consultant who works with the Kremlin, reported that Putin’s ratings had collapsed off the back of restrictions on Telegram and mobile internet, as well as rising prices and war fatigue.

Last month, criticism by Russian influencer Victoria Bonya over the internet restrictions and conditions for ordinary Russians went viral. Even an ultra-conservative TV channel, Tsargrad, spoke out against the internet restrictions, pointing to the problems of “technological dependence on Chinese components to panic within the banking sector”.

Meanwhile at an economic forum in Moscow, business leaders and economists openly criticised the government for the state of the economy. “The people at the top have completely lost touch with the reality on the ground, in the economy,” said one.

While the oil-dependent Russian economy has won some respite from the surge in prices caused by the war in Iran, economists point out that Russia would need a far longer period of high prices to balance its budget.

The regime is stable – but at risk of cracking

Whether public annoyance will be enough to shift the dial on Russian policy is different matter. “There will be different options presented to Putin,” said Matveeva, adding that “one option would be to go back to what it used to be the other option would be to continue with the current restrictions in a hope that people would eventually adapt like in the Chinese model”.

“People within the government security bloc would come up with this kind of plan saying ‘well this is what the Chinese government has done and the people adapted, so it should work in Russia’.”

Despite the tensions, however, change in Russia is both hard to predict and not likely to come from the ground up.

Edward Lucas, writer and consultant specialising in European and transatlantic security as well as Russian foreign policy, sees the current Putin regime as both rigid and brittle – appearing stable but at risk of cracking.

But Lucas warned that the Western track record of predicting change in Russia was rarely correct. “Our record in reading Russia is hopeless. We are reliably wrong in almost everything we try to predict. And it may be that Putin’s response to this is not to say, no, it’s time to be reasonable, but maybe he’ll crack down harder instead,” he told The i Paper.

With minimal organised political opposition within the country, and the power of control and coercion exercised by the security services, change would have to come down to divisions with the Russian elites.

But analysing what different elite groups think is yet more of a challenge. “The thing is the elites in Russia are so complex. You need to understand that region by region it’s different, it’s not like everyone’s in Moscow and under Putin’s thumb,” said Maximova.

Matveeva agreed. “The government structure is quite a sophisticated and developed machine with ministries, committees, an economy bloc, a security bloc. Russia has 89 regions, sub-regions and republics and some of them are pretty important, their governors are quite strong figures. Plus, there are also big enterprises in the mainstream economy, metal producers, aluminium, etc without which economy cannot really go on.”

Putin has been the great survivor, at the top of Russian government for over a quarter of a century, but how he faces up to the multitude of crises in his in-tray at the moment, may well shape not just how is reign ends, but what comes after him.

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