Ukraine has made the past few months difficult for Vladimir Putin. But many Russians fear that this month will be even worse for the President as he endures the sting of the “August curse”.
“August is a cursed month for our country,” declared the far-right, pro-Kremlin nationalist Tsargrad TV, warning Russians to prepare to be tested by enemies. “Ukraine and its Western handlers are planning another large-scale atrocity for the last month of summer.”
Another outlet cited mystical tradition, esotericism and astrology to declare August “not just a month but a temporal portal where the boundaries between worlds are thinned” and the “world enters a phase of chaos”. The forecast for Russia’s “most terrifying month of 2026” is “grim”, 7info concluded.
Others explored the sociology of the phenomenon, asking whether Russians’ penchant for a holiday in August led to reduced oversight, more errors and more accidents, or if it were psychological biases that had created the month’s “dismal reputation”.
The Russian superstition of “black August”, a time when bad news is more frequent, began with the attempted coup by hardline Communists in 1991. A succession of disasters followed, including plane crashes, financial collapses, a deadly submarine accident and the start of wars with Georgia and Chechnya. Sergey Naryshkin, director of Putin’s foreign intelligence service, dubbed it the month of invasions and provocations in 2015. Two years ago, Ukraine launched its cross-border incursion into Kursk in August.
And as his ill-judged war in Ukraine claims more lives, Putin is facing his worst August in years. At the weekend, Kyiv bombarded several regions including Moscow with more than 800 drones in its largest attack so far this year, the latest strike in its escalating campaign to bring the war home.
“The ‘August curse’ meme is one that is half believed in Russia, half raised tongue in cheek,” said Mark Galeotti, the historian and Russia expert. This August, as Muscovites leave the city for their country dachas, “there’s a weird mix: the start of the election campaign for the September polls and yet also the tempo of political life otherwise slowing”.
The Kremlin (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)The mood in Russia is souring
Superstition or not, Putin is undoubtedly facing a difficult convergence of military, economic and political problems. His carefully cultivated image as the man keeping Russia safe is being exposed as a lie.
Civilian casualties are ticking up. A drone struck a crowded Black Sea beach this month, killing seven; 13 were killed in an oil refinery attack last week; nine died in weekend drone strikes. There are now regularly devastating fires at energy hubs, ports and military sites. Russians are queuing for petrol while social media is awash with angry entrepreneurs who say their livelihoods have been wiped out by attacks on online retail warehouses. Can we quote one of them?
“My sense is that as people in Russia feel the war encroaching more onto their lives, it is leading to an impatience, a desire to see it over,” said Galeotti.
Ella Paneyakh, senior research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre (NEST), said: “Gasoline shortages caused by strikes on oil refineries, as well as fires visible in major cities, have already contributed to significant rise in anxiety and pessimism.”
Anxiety, on the rise since April, became the dominant public mood by July, according to the Kremlin-linked Public Opinion Foundation, with 55 per cent of Russians saying anxiety was the prevailing mood among family, friends and colleagues, up from 40 per cent in 2025. This summer, for the first time since 2022, Russians’ negative expectations for their futures and the future of their country outweighed positive ones, according to the Levada Centre, labelled a foreign agent by the Kremlin.
In March and April, state pollsters found Putin’s personal approval ratings had hit their lowest since 2022. Shortly afterwards, those pollsters changed their methodologies.
Paneyakh linked Putin’s falling approval ratings to “increasingly disruptive” Kremlin restrictions on mobile communications, payment services and popular messaging apps, along with “controls on economic freedom” and a “stagnating economy”. Russians have started withdrawing billions from the country’s banking system, Russian Central Bank data showed, over fears the Kremlin will seize deposits for the war, according to a report. This is causing liquidity problems and overstretching the financial sector.
Some senior economic and business officials have become more vocal in their criticism of the war’s adverse effects on the economy. War spending is rising, as is the deficit, while the central bank is struggling to tame inflation. At the weekend, Andrei Klepach was dismissed from his role as chief economist at the state development company VEB after warning that Russia’s worsening economy would lead to a “social crisis [ . . . ] when nobody expects it” like that of the Russian Revolution of 1917 or end of the Soviet Union.
John Lough, head of foreign policy at NEST, pointed out that while there was no indication that anti-war sentiment was growing, “it is likely that more questions are being asked both in the elites and society about the purpose of the war and how long will it last”.
Smoke from burning Wildberries warehouses following a Ukrainian drone attack in Koledino, Moscow region on Sunday (Photo: Reuters)This August is a delicate moment
Keir Giles, a Russian affairs commentator and author, says that while “the August curse is a nice idea, I’m not aware that anybody’s ever actually done the number crunching to compare whether there was actually more bad news in August compared to any other month”.
“The curse might just be a function of August being a slow news time elsewhere, so stuff gets more attention now. It’s a country which generates quite a lot of bad news year round,” he added.
But this August – cursed or not – is a particularly sensitive time for Putin in the run-up to next month’s State Duma elections. While the result is – as with all elections in Russia – a foregone conclusion, the government must maintain at least a semblance of choice. The banning of Yabloko, the remaining anti-war party, suggests the Kremlin is particularly jumpy about public opinion and the possibility of a protest vote against the war.
“The Ukrainian air campaign is creating an unpleasant background for the Kremlin ahead of parliamentary elections next month,” said Lough. “While these are not free and fair, they measure public attitudes towards the authorities. In recent months, Putin’s rating has fallen as has that of the Kremlin’s political party, United Russia.”
There is also real concern that Putin could order a second wave of mobilisation to top up dwindling manpower. “Obviously the threat of mobilisation is a shadow over the country,” said Galeotti.
Russia has incurred 1.4 million casualties including an estimated half a million dead. This year, casualties outstripped new recruits. Putin has so far resisted another mobilisation after a previous one in 2022 prompted an exodus from Russia, but difficulties on the battlefield may have changed the calculus, and a new wave is “currently society’s top concern”, said Lough. “There is widespread speculation that Putin will order another wave of mobilisation after the elections.”
However, Sergei Medvedev, a Russian political scientist and affiliated professor at Charles University in Prague, dismissed the suggestion that the worsening situation within Russia would prompt any serious backlash.
“Society is so atomised and apathetic that people don’t care until it hits them directly,” he told The i Paper. “They don’t care about war, civilian casualties; it is somewhere far, on the TV.
“Putin (like Stalin before him) is blessed with an amazingly pliant, flexible and adaptive people that are ready to accept anything that the state throws at it, from mobilisation and hundreds of thousands killed to drones flying over your head and probably ruining their business. They cannot and will not protest… any change in Russia comes from above, or from the side, but not from the people.”
If the situation in Russia deteriorates much further this August, Putin may be thankful that his population has a “curse” to blame instead of the man who got his country into this mess in the first place.
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