What Do Russians Really Think About Putin’s War?

On June 23, 2023, the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin’s decision led to some of the most extraordinary scenes in recent Russian history. When his Wagner Group forces seized control of the provincial capital of Rostov-on-Don, the city’s population publicly embraced the mutineers, bringing the rebels food and drink and cheering them in front of live TV cameras. When Prigozhin turned up in person, not long before he ultimately abandoned his rebellion, Rostovites treated him to a hero’s welcome.

So what was going on here? Were the people of Rostov merely applauding Prigozhin’s status as a teller of unpalatable truths about the invasion of Ukraine? Were they just venting their frustrations with the obvious incompetence of the heads of the regular army? Did they think that Wagner would win and were implicitly picking sides? Were they seizing the opportunity to express broader discontent? Or all of the above—or none?

The Prigozhin mutiny offers a vivid illustration of the pitfalls facing anyone trying to figure out what the Russian public actually thinks. But it’s a question that needs answers urgently. Countering the Putin regime and its war against Ukraine will be far harder unless policymakers and strategists can arrive at an accurate understanding of Russian public opinion.

In his New Year’s Eve address at the end of 2023, Putin articulated the vision that he wants Russians—and, to some extent, the rest of us—to accept: The Russian people and their leader constitute a “united society.” In this telling, there’s no daylight between Putin’s vision for the country and what ordinary Russians want—and that includes the war in Ukraine, which he depicts as a heroic struggle (against so-called neo-Nazis) that is broadly supported by his fellow citizens.

The reality, of course, is rather more complicated. That appearance of seamless consensus is enforced by an all-encompassing police state. An immense security apparatus keeps close tabs on everything that Russians say and do. Some of Putin’s most prominent critics, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, are serving eye-watering prison sentences for (among other things) allegedly spreading “false information” about the Russian military and the war. Leading dissident Alexei Navalny, another famous anti-war activist, recently died in prison under unclear circumstances. Shortly thereafter, his aide Leonid Volkov, living in exile in Lithuania, was viciously attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant.

Ordinary Russians are well aware of the dangers of saying the wrong thing. The elderly still have vivid memories of life under former leaders Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, memories that have percolated through to current generations in a variety of ways. Exiled opposition activist Lyubov Sobol doesn’t believe that Russians are willing to say what they think to pollsters: “Most often you’re going to get unreliable results with answers that skew pro-government,” she told me in an email. “Those who support Putin’s regime will answer honestly and openly, while people from the opposition will be afraid to tell the truth and hide their real sentiments for fear of reprisals, problems at work and other troubles.”

Reliable polling requires a minimal measure of trust, and trust is generally in short supply in all closed societies, not only Russia. The accuracy of any public opinion survey is contingent on the availability of respondents who have no fear of negative consequences and who can regard their questioners as relatively trustworthy. Neither condition is a given in Russia.

Pollsters everywhere worry about what they call social desirability bias—the intense pressure to say what you know you’re expected to say—but in autocracies, it’s a far more acute problem. Few Russians are likely to share their genuine views with someone they don’t know who called them up on a phone—and even fewer are likely to express dissenting viewpoints.

How the West and Ukraine craft their messaging to the Russian population depends to a considerable degree on how well they understand what Russians are thinking. (If ordinary Russian soldiers don’t actually believe in what the Russian Orthodox Church calls the “holy war” against Kyiv, for example, giving them incentives to desert could prove a highly effective weapon.)

Figuring out public sentiment is equally important for Putin himself, who has a small army of his own pollsters to assess the national mood. But can he really rely on them to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear? He may never be able to free himself from his own propaganda narratives—which are so strikingly at odds with the behavior of those Prigozhin fans in Rostov.

The problem is compounded by those who are doing the polling. Two of the most prominent polling organizations in the country, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) and the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), are state-controlled. A third, the Levada Center (formed by a group of experts who broke off from VCIOM in 2003), is often described as “independent,” but it has come under repeated attack from the Kremlin, which has denounced it as a “foreign agent” and pressured it in all sorts of other ways.

Two years ago, the independent website Proekt published an investigation alleging direct Kremlin intervention in VCIOM’s work. The journalists claimed that VCIOM responded to the pressure by changing the wording of survey questions in ways that signaled to respondents what the “proper” answers might be.

Officials also allegedly persuaded the pollsters to stop showing longer-term trends in Putin’s trust and approval ratings on the company website—including the lows that started in 2018, when his standing was dented by a deeply unpopular pension reform. Russians’ trust in their president dropped to a 14-year low of 28.3 percent in March 2020, though it would subsequently rise sharply after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The data from Levada and other independent pollsters, such as Russian Field and the Chronicle Group, show that general support for the war remains strong—77 percent, according to the latest Levada poll, published in March. Yet Levada also noted that more respondents (52 percent) favored peace negotiations than the continuation of hostilities (40 percent), which doesn’t square with the Kremlin’s desires. And a whopping 66 percent of those surveyed agreed that Russia is paying too high a price for the invasion.

Opposition activist Vladimir Milov writes that these findings complicate the picture of supposedly solid support for the war that is often cited in the media. He argues that the total number of supporters cited in the polls tends to paper over significant differences between those who “unconditionally support” the war (a group he puts at 35 percent to 40 percent) and those who “more support than oppose” it. He notes that opinion surveys have consistently shown strong opposition to a second wave of military mobilization, which is probably why Putin has so far held back from ordering it.

Milov also points out that the audience for state-run television—long Putin’s preferred method for hammering his message into the minds of the people—is in stark decline, a signal of shrinking trust in official media. And he draws attention to the stark demographic differences among respondents: Support for the war predominates among the elderly and the rural, while it is at its weakest among the younger urban population.

Critics of the regime have also drawn attention to a remarkable online interview last fall in which the head of VCIOM, Valery Fyodorov, expressed his own views on the complexities of public sentiment. Hardcore supporters of the invasion amount to no more than 15 percent of the population, he said, while some 16 percent to 18 percent remain opposed.

The overwhelming majority of the population is essentially apathetic and will tell pollsters and officials whatever they want to hear. But this form of support, Fyodorov implied, is fundamentally grudging and opportunistic. Some experts describe it with the elegant term “learned indifference.” Fyodorov cites an earthy Russian proverb: “They’re always flipping you off in their pocket.”

These comments don’t entirely square with the data published by Fyodorov’s organization—which should only amplify our skepticism. I remain unconvinced by the data from polls conducted in Russia, even when it comes from the more independent organizations. I’m pretty sure, based on my own experience with man-on-the-street interviews in Russia and conversations with pollsters, that the number of people who decline to answer polling questions is far higher than those willing to respond, which should make us very cautious about the results.

Experts are trying out new ways of attacking the problem—often by leveraging the data-collection power of the internet. Two British political scientists, Cambridge University’s Roberto Stefan Foa and Surrey University’s Roula Nezi, have been studying Russians’ search queries on Google and Yandex, a homegrown search engine.

Foa told me that this data shows, among other things, that Russians are feeling far less financially secure than is often claimed: queries about “bankruptcy,” “mortgage refinancing,” and “kidney donation” have jumped since the start of the invasion. Searches about depression, anxiety, and suicide have also skyrocketed.

The researchers also tracked a rise in queries relating to authoritarianism (including historian Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism and Orwell’s 1984). For a long time, Foa noted, the implicit bargain has been that Putin would deliver prosperity and stability, and Russians would respond with political quiescence. Now that deal has been broken by the war, with its conscription, its economic uncertainties and its intrusive propaganda. “These days the regime is very much in your life,” Foa said. “Now it’s politicized people who were not interested in politics before.”

Toronto-based RIWI is trying out a different approach. They’ve developed a technique that offers  quick online surveys to internet users who click on broken links or search for dormant websites. The surveys are entirely anonymous, and unlike a phone-based poll, they reveal nothing specific about the respondent, so the sense of risk about answering is much lower. The company claims that its data sometimes tracks the polls, but it also diverges in striking ways. One of the RIWI surveys recently picked up on a notable dip in the number of Russians willing to agree with the sentiment “my country, right or wrong”—perhaps a reflection of the general frustration with the slow progress of the war.

“Truth lies at the confluence of many stories,” Foa told me, and I’m inclined to agree. One of my favorite sources is a channel on YouTube (the only major social media platform to remain uncensored in Russia) by a young journalist named Daniil Orain, whose method entails walking up to people on the street and asking them what they think. His channel, which now has some 560 videos, offers a gigantic focus group of Russians sharing their views on everything from romance to gaming.

There’s plenty of politics, too. Though Orain is clearly anti-war himself, he gives plenty of space to respondents explaining their support for Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. Some of his more hair-raising interviewees declare that the war won’t be over until the last Ukrainian “Nazi” is wiped or assert that Poland might be a suitable target for future attack.

Yet there are also plenty of people who are happy to declare their contempt for Putin (sometimes in fairly scatological terms). Orain’s channel features several “I’m too old to give a damn” interviews with sharply critical pensioners. Interestingly, younger interviewees who express anti-regime sentiments often come off as measured, sober, and distinctly anti-revolutionary. It is hard to know why they’re willing to share such views so candidly.

Watch Orain’s videos closely, and you’ll see many of his ostensibly pro-government respondents visibly fudging their answers. Some of them cut their interviews short. (Orain is also confronting the response rate problem. When reporting a piece about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for example, 28 people agreed to be interviewed—but 124 declined.) Some resort to dodges or cryptic shortcuts; still others resort to jingoist bluster so extreme that they come off as either fake or mentally ill.

One thing is for sure, though: When someone tells you that Russians are united and uniform in their views, don’t take them at their word. Figuring out what’s really going on inside those heads won’t be easy. But we’ve got to keep trying.