Putin’s Hidden Weakness

In Russia’s presidential election in mid-March, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially won his fifth term with 87 percent of the vote and the highest reported turnout in the country’s post-Soviet history. Indeed, by most measures, Putin remains popular. Opinion surveys just before the election pegged his approval rating above 80 percent. Some voters are likely afraid to tell pollsters otherwise, of course, but for an autocrat, that kind of fear is almost as good as real support. Either way, Russians are generally avoiding open protest. This helps the Kremlin get away with touting Putin’s sweeping election victory as an endorsement of both the president and his signature policy, the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, these numbers are far from a reliable indicator of popular support for the war. Many Russians, including Putin voters, are skeptical of the Kremlin’s determination to continue the two-year-old conflict. Although Putin’s approval ratings are impressive, survey data from the Russian Election Study (RES), which we lead, indicate that only a slim majority of his supporters now favor staying the course in Ukraine. In fact, despite the Kremlin’s massive effort to drum up support, nearly one in four Putin backers opposes continuing the war, and roughly the same number say they are unsure whether they support the war (19 percent) or decline to answer the question (four percent). This means that only slightly more than half of Putin supporters—54 percent—think Russia should continue the war that Putin has championed since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Among all Russian voters, support for Putin’s war is even softer. In October 2023, just 43 percent of Russians said they backed continuing what the Kremlin refers to as its “special military operation.” When asked to identify their position on the war, a third of those surveyed chose the response, “No, I do not support the continuation of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine,” and nearly a quarter declined to state an opinion. These figures are surely known to the Kremlin, which conducts its own polls and allows independent surveys to operate as well. Because it is easier to govern as a popular autocrat than an unpopular one, Putin closely tracks public opinion. The Kremlin works tirelessly to shape these opinions, but its efforts to drive up support for Putin himself have been more successful than its attempts to boost support for the war.

These findings are both good and bad news for Ukraine and its allies. Waning support for the war among Russian citizens will not, in itself, compel Putin to end his assault on the country. Given the Kremlin’s extensive suppression of civil society and public dissent, he can continue to wage war without strong popular backing for it. The lack of popular enthusiasm, however, could complicate this effort. Putin will need to rely more heavily on repression to forestall opposition. Lack of popular enthusiasm for the war’s continuation also makes it harder to recruit soldiers and maintain morale and raises the cost of buying public support. In a televised address following the March 22 terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall, Putin made a call for unity, while alleging Ukrainian involvement in the attack. His remarks suggest that the Kremlin will seek to use the attack to bolster support for aggression against Ukraine or for tougher terrorism laws that would further stifle domestic dissent. Winning the election was easy; stiffer challenges lie ahead.

BUSINESS AS USUAL?

In some respects, the RES’s most recent survey provides a sobering view of public support for the Putin regime. Contrary to some observers’ hopes that declining support for the war might trigger the collapse of Putin’s rule, the findings suggest it is not so simple. Led by a team of scholars supported by the National Science Foundation, the RES has contributed to understanding the evolution of Russian public opinion and voting behavior for nearly three decades. In national surveys conducted around each Russian presidential election in which Putin has featured as a candidate, the team has found that his support is multidimensional. This month’s election supports that pattern. The Russian leader continues to draw on a broad base among ordinary Russians—support built over nearly a quarter century that can prop him up even if many of these backers sour on the war itself. Putin’s appeal also continues to rest on his management of the country’s economy, his hypermasculine image, and—increasingly—his association with conservative values that resonate with many Russian citizens.

Manipulating these other sources of support has been part of Putin’s strategy all along, a tactic often overlooked in Western analyses of Russia’s war strategy. Since the start of the invasion, for example, he has frequently downplayed the so-called special military operation, suggesting that the armed forces will take care of it, leaving most ordinary Russians to go about their lives as usual. He has also stressed the message that Russia has remained stable and continued to flourish during the war.

Consider the economy. Russians who support Putin despite opposing the war are generally optimistic about how the economy has performed in the face of Western sanctions. About half of them think the economy is either unchanged or has even recovered over the last 12 months. (By contrast, just 14 percent of Russians who do not support Putin and are against the war see the Russian economy in this positive light.) Russians who are pro-Putin but antiwar are also much more likely to have avoided personal financial losses since the invasion of Ukraine: three in four report that their household finances have remained the same or improved over the past year. More than half of respondents who oppose both Putin and the war say their economic situation has worsened.

But there is a tension in the Kremlin’s efforts to downplay the war and promote a sense of normality. At various moments, including the launch of Putin’s reelection campaign in December 2023, he has emphasized that Russia’s fight—in Ukraine and against the West—is an existential one and that every Russian must do their part. Another such moment was when Putin ordered the “partial mobilization” in the fall of 2022, calling up hundreds of thousands of Russians to fight. Such moves contradict the Kremlin’s other messaging that seeks to minimize the war. Raising the stakes of the war effort is a risky strategy in itself. Should Putin continue to push an existential narrative and his supporters tire of the war, they may become more likely to break with him if developments take a negative turn in other areas they care about, such as the economy.

This risk could increase if opposition to the war grows or if Russia’s economic outlook deteriorates. For example, our research shows that Putin supporters who oppose continuing the war are still divided about whether financing the offensive should take priority over social programs. This may partly reflect the Kremlin’s success, at least so far, in increasing social spending and maintaining a sense of economic stability even as it put the economy firmly on a war footing. If Russia experiences an economic decline or a demand for more social spending, this acquiescence to the war could diminish, eroding Putin’s base.

IT’S THE WAR, STUPID

A larger potential concern for the Kremlin is the specific nature of popular opposition to the war. The most recent RES survey shows that some groups from which Putin has traditionally drawn support now oppose the military campaign. For one thing, Russians who are skeptical about the war are disproportionately women, and more than a quarter of Putin’s female supporters want the special military operation to end. For another, Putin’s supporters in rural areas are more opposed to prolonging the war than his backers in Russia’s major urban centers, with one in three saying they are against continuing it. These rural areas have been hit harder by military recruitment than urban centers. If antiwar sentiment among these Russians begins to align with anti-Putin sentiment, as it more often has in cities, it could be a turning point for the Kremlin.

Added to these potential problems is the possibility that the Kremlin might be compelled to order another round of mobilization. Such a decision would have a particular impact on women and rural Russians. Men from rural areas are far more likely to be mobilized than those from major cities. And wives and mothers of soldiers, who are particularly concerned about high casualty rates and eager for their loved ones to be rotated home from the front, have already become a key source of public protest against the government’s war strategy. To mollify this constituency, the Kremlin could rotate frontline troops more frequently—but that could, in turn, require fresh rounds of mobilization.

Among Putin supporters, opposition to the war is particularly concentrated in groups that are more likely to be recruited for military service and facing economically precarious circumstances. In remote ethnic regions in Siberia such as Buryatia, Altai, and Zabaykalskii Krai, where death rates among men of military age have been among Russia’s highest, as many as two-thirds of Putin supporters are outright against continuing the war. On average, in these regions and in other ethnic republics, such as Chuvashia and Udmurtia, roughly half of all Putin supporters express antiwar sentiments. Similarly, less-educated Putin backers are more likely to oppose continuing the war than their counterparts with advanced degrees.

Faced with this ambivalence toward the war in the very regions where the Russian military has been concentrating its recruitment efforts, the Kremlin has taken no chances. After initially allowing the antiwar opposition candidate Boris Nadezhdin to register for the presidential election, the Russian authorities disqualified him on the grounds that the signatures he had collected were invalid. Clearly, the Putin regime thought that it was too dangerous for Nadezhdin to press his case to an electorate already skeptical about continuing the “special military operation.”

To paper over antiwar sentiment, Russian state television regularly broadcasts displays of pro-military fervor and bellicosity, and Russian schools have doubled down on patriotic education. But such efforts have been unable to quash doubt, even among the war’s supporters. For example, only half of Russians who support continuing the war say that the best path available in February 2022 was “starting a full-scale military operation.”

THE THREAT FROM WITHIN

For Putin to retain his base of support, an electoral victory is less important than what comes after. In the past, he has sometimes deferred unpopular moves until after elections. A new wave of mobilization is the most opposed potential policy on the horizon. Even many backers of the war do not seem interested in making personal sacrifices to advance the effort. In a recent RES survey, seven of ten respondents who support the war said they were opposed to a fresh mobilization. In a hypothetical election scenario, support for a candidate declined by 25 percentage points when respondents were told that the candidate advocated mass conscription. Even Putin backers reduced their support for this hypothetical candidate by 16 points. All these findings suggest that there is only so much Putin can ask Russians to sacrifice for the war without fomenting more serious opposition.

For now, the Kremlin’s official position is that no new mobilization is needed. It has recruited enough soldiers on lucrative contracts over the past year to carry out some limited rotation and forestall the demand for more troops. The Kremlin’s strategy for avoiding a new mobilization appears to be to place the principal combat burden on politically marginalized groups—ethnic minorities, the rural poor, and convicts—and to pay big salaries and bonuses to those who volunteer to fight.

At the same time, the Kremlin has asked the wives and mothers of soldiers at the front to be patient, promising new benefits and social mobility for combat veterans who return home. Putin has assured loyalists—war supporters and those who have served—that they are the “true elite” and will be showered with rewards. Only time will tell whether he will uphold his promise to place and promote them in state companies, education, public associations, and government, a pledge he made in his annual address in February. Further battlefield setbacks for Russia, however, would make signing up new contract soldiers and other volunteer forces the Kremlin has used to fill manpower gaps more difficult. If fewer Russians volunteered, this would raise the pressure for more extensive mobilization, an option that Putin is clearly trying to avoid. A stagnating economy would compound this challenge, reducing his room to maneuver and making it more likely that he would effectively have to choose between the war and his core supporters.

Even staunch Putin supporters are largely ambivalent about the war.

To make either scenario more likely, Western countries must challenge Moscow in its current bet that Western war fatigue is eroding support for Kyiv. Although Western analysts have suggested in recent assessments that Russia may be gaining the upper hand over Ukraine, that trend can be reversed. The West must supply Ukraine with the military support it needs to make Russia’s rotation of troops more urgent and the Russian costs of volunteering high. At the same time, Western nations should send Russian audiences a message that the economic and military costs of continuing the war in Ukraine outweigh the benefits. In doing so, the West could exploit the fact that war fatigue is now a problem for Moscow itself and that popular dissatisfaction with continuing the offensive is real—even among Putin’s own supporters.

Such efforts to capitalize on Russian opposition to the war will not automatically drive Putin from office. It is hard to oust an autocrat, especially in wartime, and even autocrats who lose wars often stay in power. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein survived ruinous wars against Iran and Kuwait. But the dissonance among the Russian leader’s base must unnerve the Kremlin. After the February death of Alexei Navalny, it may seem that the regime has all but eliminated viable sources of opposition. But Putin’s greatest threat may now come from his own current supporters.

Putin’s policies have not always followed public opinion, but he has generally avoided taking steps—such as steep increases in the pension age—that are broadly unpopular, and military mobilization certainly falls within this category. Moreover, despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, even staunch Putin supporters are largely ambivalent about the war. That the Kremlin devotes so much energy to snuffing out even trivial forms of antiwar activity suggests that it is acutely aware of the danger that such discontent poses—a danger that even an overwhelming electoral victory cannot hide.