Commentary by  Maria Snegovaya  and  Jade McGlynn

Published July 7, 2026

Since 2022, the Kremlin has sought to “normalize” its war against Ukraine and insulate ordinary Russians from its costs. In recent months, however, Ukraine has increasingly brought the war to Russia through a set of attacks on refineries, other energy infrastructure, and transport hubs that have caused flight delays, airport closures, and, more recently, worsening fuel shortages. If this shift radically alters Russians’ attitudes toward the war, it could mark a key turning point. To that end, this analysis examines how Russians have responded to major shocks over the past four years.

Divisions within the pro-war camp complicate the picture. There are broadly two pro-Kremlin groups: “hawks” and “loyalists.” Hawks, which constitute about 15 percent, are more ideologically driven, want more decisive military action, and think Russian President Vladimir Putin is too cautious in foreign policy. They are more likely to rally around the flag in response to military shocks. The other group, the loyalists—at around 35–40 percent—mainly aspire to be left alone, are less ideological, and less interested in politics than other groups. They are foreign policy moderates, and are more likely to withdraw their support for the war in response to such shocks, especially those that affect them personally. These divisions produce more heterogeneous responses to the war, with the reactions of the two groups often moving in opposite directions.

Russian Opinion Polls: Imperfect but Informative

While some analysts question the reliability of public opinion polling in Russia’s tightening autocratic context, multiple methodological studies conducted since 2022 have found no major distortions in independent polling data with respect to sample composition, response rates, or respondents’ willingness to participate. Studies examining preference falsification (or “hidden” opposition to the war) have generally found little, if any, evidence that support is systematically overstated: To the extent such bias exists, it is unlikely to exceed several percentage points. Taken together, while Russian polling should be interpreted with appropriate caution, it is a broadly reliable indicator of public opinion trends.

The available evidence suggests a gradual increase in public support for ending the war over the last few years, even if the Kremlin’s stated military objectives remain unmet. Moreover, those objectives have shifted repeatedly over the past 4.5 years, and public understandings of what constitutes success are highly diverse. ExtremeScan’s surveys between 2024 and 2026 indicate roughly two thirds of respondents consistently favor a ceasefire through mutual concessions. Support for freezing the conflict along the current line has consistently exceeded support for continuing the war to achieve full control over the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. However, this preference for ending the fighting has not translated into support for territorial concessions: Only about 18 percent of respondents support returning occupied Ukrainian territory, while most Russians continued to favor retaining the territories Russia already occupies.

Since the outset of the full-scale invasion and until recently, four events stood out as particularly significant shocks to the Russian public opinion: (1) the imposition of sanctionsat the outset of the war, (2) the partial mobilization in September 2022, (3) Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny of June 2023, and (4) Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast beginning in early August 2024. In each case, Russian public opinion responded similarly: rising anxiety, a decline in Putin’s approval and support for the war, and greater support for peace negotiations.

Military Shocks Matter Less

Short-term military shocks often produce a limited rally-around-the-flag effect. For instance, according to Levada Center, a recent wave of intensified Ukrainian drone strikes in April–May 2026 appears to have initially increased war support, although Putin’s approval ratings did not rise. Evidence from Russia’s frontline regions, Kursk Oblast and Belgorod Oblast, also suggests that greater exposure to the war did not immediately undermine support for the Kremlin. Instead, residents largely adapted to recurring attacks that created a “new normal,” some rallied around the flag, and overall support for the war in the border regions has remained consistentlyabove the national average. Over time, however, surveys have pointed to growing war fatigue and emotional exhaustion.

ExtremeScan’s polling in the border regions loosely aligns with the loyalist-hawk division. About half of respondents were ready to fight back, broadly in line with the hawkish pattern. Another roughly 40–50 percent were either reluctant to answer sensitive questions or unwilling to support or take part in the war. Crucially, those who had personally borne war-related costs (e.g., curfews, movement restrictions, or shortages of medicines and food) were about 1.5 times more likely to support troop withdrawal and negotiations. This personal-cost sensitivity is a loyalist signature. The group is not uniform, however: It blends genuinely disengaged loyalists with outright war sceptics. Reticence under the heavier repression of the border regions, may also conceal more opposition than national estimates would suggest. Loyalist disaffection tends to express itself as withdrawal, cynicism, private grumbling, and exit.

Economic Decline Matters More

Economic conditions appear to matter more than military developments in shaping support for the war, especially among loyalists. Surveys in Russia since 2022 have repeatedly shown that perceptions of current wellbeing and economic expectations positively correlate with war support; and economically better-offRussians have generally been more supportiveof the war than poorer respondents. During the first years of the conflict, higher levels of war approval coincided with rapid real wage growth at a scale unseen since the mid-2000s, which was fueled by increased wartime government spending.

Now, as Russia’s economic outlook has deteriorated and growth has stagnated since early 2026, public attitudes appear to be shifting. According to ExtremeScan polls, between January 2024 and March 2026 the share of respondents reporting an improvement in their financial situation fell from 20 percent to 13 percent in March 2026, while respondents reporting a deterioration doubled (from 20 percent to 41 percent) over the same period. According to a recent Gallup survey, Russian perceptions on the economy have turned negative. For the first time since 2006, a majority of respondents surveyed (a record 60 percent) between March and May said local economic conditions are getting worse. Also for the first time in two decades, a majority (56 percent) report that their standard of living is deteriorating. According to the June 2026 Levada survey, only 52 percent of respondents said Russia is moving in the right direction—the lowest level recorded since February 2022.

Economic concerns are affecting attitudes toward the conflict: According to a recent Institute of Conflictology and Analysis of Russia (IKAR) poll, respondents rank ending the war and improving their financial well-being as Russia’s two highest priorities, well ahead of other options, with each cited by 58 percent of respondents. Moreover, a record 81 percent of respondents say they would support ending the war tomorrow—the highest level recorded in IKAR’s polling since the start of the full-scale invasion.

These trends coincide with an erosion of confidence in state institutions: Confidence in the military fell by 13 points to 66 percent, the sharpest decline on record and a direct index of the war’s costs registering at home; trust in the national fell government 14 points to 53 percent, and in the honesty of elections 16 points to 40 percent—all record one-year drops—while perceptions of media freedom plunged 25 points to a new low of 34 percent. Putin himself has not been immune to this trend. Levada recorded a decline in Putin’s approval from 87 percent in August 2025 to 79 percent in April 2026. Even the Kremlin-linked VCIOM pollster showed Putin’s approval rating declining from 78 percent at the end of December 2025 to 67 percent by late April. VCIOM subsequently revised its methodology, likely to curtail the decline in Putin’s ratings, and also stopped publishing altogether another “open-ended” trust rating, which has shown even steeper decline in Putin’s support. While such declines are not unprecedented over the quarter century of Putin’s rule, the downward trend is unmistakable.

Attacks on Refineries Combine Both Effects

Ukraine’s ongoing long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries combine both aforementioned mechanisms: They are military attacks imposing tangible economic costs. Ukraine’s self-described “long-range sanctions” campaign against Russia therefore has greater potential to erode public support for the war than military strikes alone. They are, however, likely to produce divergent effects among loyalists and hawks. While hawks, at least initially, may tend to rally and push for tougher military responses, loyalists are more likely to respond to the mounting costs by withdrawing war support.

As illustrated by long lines to gas stations from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia, the economic and social impact of this campaign is already visible despite being only weeks old. The Ukrainian strikes were the most frequently cited as the most notable event of May and June, mentioned by 16 percent and 24 percent of respondents respectively. The effects will spread to other sectors, as diesel shortages are likely to disrupt agricultural machinery and supply trucks, potentially threatening Russia’s crucial mid-summer harvest and fuel deliveries to remote regions. They also add upward pressure on inflation, one of the Russian public’s core economic concerns, as the government struggles to contain price growthamid high wartime spending. These factors are likely to further erode support for the authorities and increase public preference for ending the war.

While a cross-border incursion is externally caused and clearly framed as enemy aggression, a fuel queue is different: a banal, recurring inconvenience that is experienced as one of the domestic costs of a war Russia chose and continues to wage. Casualties can be hidden, renamed, and ritualized, and after four years, the Kremlin is well practiced in doing so. The regime can mobilize people against an attacker. It is far harder to mobilize them against a shortage.

Russia’s increasingly restricted information environment and intensifying repressions have limited the nationwide diffusion of such developments. For instance, some Muscovites expressed disbelief after reports of the explosion at the Moscow Oil Refinery, illustrating the extent of compartmentalization of the wartime disruptions. However, fuel shortages appear to bypass some of the information controls that normally mediate the war, as evidenced by the popularity of the services “Где бензин” (“Where’s the Gas?”) and “Есть бензин” (“There’s gas”). These crowdsourced, real-time maps of Russian filling stations show fuel availability and queues, based on markers left by drivers themselves rather than official sources.

Similar patterns emerged during the four shocks discussed previously. Readership of independent, largely exiled media tended to rise, a pattern documented after the September 2022 partial mobilization, during Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, and following the Kursk incursion in August 2024. At the invasion’s onset, the blocking of Facebook and Instagram in March 2022 sent VPN installations up by more than 11,000 percent in a single day and overall VPN demand up by roughly 2,000 percent in a week. Russians know where to find independent information and actively seek it out at moments they perceive as touching their own safety, even though such outlets reach only a small minority of the population in ordinary times. The fuel crisis is precisely the kind of personally felt daily disruption that could prompt people to look past the official account.

In addition, unlike internet outages or many other wartime disruptions, fuel shortages produce visible queues that allow Russians to perceive that the problem is widespread rather than limited to their own experience. As such, they partially offset the atomization typical of the Russian society by making a shared problem widely visible. The Kremlin’s media toolkit is aimed at narrative, or the mediated layer—for example, banning photographs of queues—but it is far less effective against a self-organizing ledger of physical fact, reported by drivers themselves. Queues carry symbolic weight in Russia, recalling the shortages of the late Soviet period and the early 1990s, associated with a weakening state’s inability to provide basic goods.

The reported disbelief among some Muscovites at the Kapotnya strike proves that propaganda can still shape perceptions, but is limited once the consequences become physical, local, and personal. For many Russians, this is the first experience of the war to arrive unmediated. That said, limited media access and the threat of repression still cap how far word travels. IKAR’s monitoring of media reactions to the fuel crisis finds the state treating perception as a separate domain of crisis management: bans on photographing fuel tankers and station queues, the labeling of shortage reporting as fakes or disinformation, and discussion of tighter VPN restrictions. In parallel, pro-government military bloggers and commentators have recast the disruptions as a product of Ukrainian “terrorist” strikes rather than the decision to continue the war, reaching for besieged-fortress and retaliation narratives that fold everyday hardship into a case for further escalation.

The impact of this campaign is therefore likely to remain localized rather than produce a reversal in public opinion. However, frustration that cannot be aimed at the regime rarely dissipates; under repression it is displaced onto weaker, safer targets and can erupt unexpectedly. In May 1915, wartime shortages and anger that could not touch the autocracy erupted instead into the anti-German riots that gutted Moscow. Patriotic feeling again curdled into violence in October 2023, when a mob stormed an airport in Makhachkala hunting Jewish passengers off a flight from Tel Aviv. The danger for the Kremlin, then, is less organized protest against the war—for which it is well equipped—than displacement: pressure that finds release in an unexpected, and not necessarily political, direction.

How the West Can Respond

Ultimately, the shift in public opinion alone is unlikely to compel the Kremlin to end the war. More important is that fuel shortages increase the Kremlin’s political costs by making public frustration increasingly costly to manage. Shrinking fiscal resources, fewer funds for the military-industrial complex, fuel shortages, and intensifying competition among regions and sectors for increasingly scarce resources all gradually erode the state’s ability to sustain the war over time. This would also be the moment for the West to simultaneously intensify sanctions pressure in Russia, reinforcing the economic cost of sustaining the war.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure also manufacture a rare moment when the causal chain, from the war’s outset to fuel shortages to the Kremlin’s choice to keep fighting, is more legible to ordinary Russians. Whether that legibility translates into attribution to the regime or dissipates into blame aimed elsewhere is not fixed. It is a contest over meaning, and it is a lever that Ukrainian and Western information efforts can pull. Sanctions raise the material costs; information efforts help determine whether Russians connect these costs to the war. The two belong in one strategy rather than in sequence.

Maria Snegovaya is a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Jade McGlynn is a senior associate (non-resident), in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS.

This commentary is made possible by a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, formerly Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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