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A Breakdown of The Equilibrium: A sharp deterioration in public sentiment is accompanied by a communication vacuum between the public and the authorities
The rapidly escalating petrol crisis is reshaping both the news agenda and the social climate in Russia with equal speed. Public anxiety and frustration are readily apparent in social media and journalistic reporting. But how does the situation appear in public opinion surveys?
The first blow to the average Russian’s information landscape came from Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and on Moscow in mid-June. During the final ten days of the month, this crisis backdrop was compounded by the growing petrol crisis, creating a dense atmosphere of anxiety. The crisis, however, developed so quickly that even weekly surveys seem unable to capture the full pace of events.
Throughout June, the ‘bubble of support’, that is the reservoir of heightened loyalty that had appeared in survey data after the start of the war, continued to deflate. In June, this erosion extended to Putin’s approval and trust ratings, something that had not yet been clearly visible in the May results. Overall, indicators of loyalty to the authoritarian regime in June 2026 had almost returned to the levels observed at the outset of the war, with nearly the entire loyalty overhang having been exhausted. Another major development in June was the sharp decline in the Levada Center’s consumer sentiment index.
At the same time, efforts by the authorities to restrict information about Ukrainian strikes and the scale of the petrol crisis have had only limited success. Although Telegram’s share among Russians’ sources of information has declined noticeably, social media remains the principal and most effective channel for information about ongoing events, circumventing censorship and official silence. Meanwhile, television continues to lose not only viewers but, at an even faster pace, their trust. Particularly noteworthy is that, over the past six months, while the Russian authorities and President Putin personally have been vigorously promoting largely illusory successes of the Russian military, the erosion of trust in television appears to have spread even to pensioners, traditionally the segment most loyal to the Kremlin.
The current situation can be described as a breakdown of the authoritarian equilibrium that became firmly established around the second year of the war. Never before, it seems, has the arsenal of information manipulation, traditionally one of the strongest assets of Putin’s autocracy, been so weakened at such an inopportune moment.
Crisis themes: drone attacks and petrol
The rapidly escalating petrol crisis is reshaping both the information agenda and the social atmosphere in Russia with equal speed. The crisis is unfolding at the height of the tourist season, which this year has already been overshadowed by the effective loss of Crimea and most of the Caucasian Black Sea coast from the country’s holiday repertoire. Domestic car tourism is now also under threat. Public anxiety and frustration are clearly visible in social media and reporting from Russia. But how do these sentiments appear in public opinion surveys, notwithstanding the well-known limitations of polling under a repressive autocracy? Events have moved so quickly in recent weeks that even rapid telephone surveys have struggled to keep pace.
Weekly surveys by FOM and the monthly monitoring by the Levada Center (with data collected during the final week of June) provide a partial picture of how the crisis-driven information agenda expanded in public opinion over the preceding three weeks. Both organisations ask respondents about the events they remember most from the past week (in FOM’s ‘Dominants’ survey) or the month (in the Levada Center’s survey). The first blow to the Russian public’s news agenda came from Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and on Moscow in mid-June. By the 20th, this issue dominated respondents’ recollections of recent events (see Table 1). It was mentioned by one quarter of all respondents. Given that only about half of those surveyed provided a substantive answer to the question, this means that roughly one in two people surveyed, who named any event at all, referred to the refinery strikes or the attacks on Moscow.
During the final ten days of June, this crisis backdrop was supplemented by the rapidly growing petrol crisis. In FOM’s telephone survey conducted on 26-28 June, 15% of those surveyed mentioned it, equivalent to about one quarter of all those who named any events. In the Levada Center’s face-to-face survey conducted during the last week of the month, the figure had already risen to 22%, or roughly one third of those who recalled at least one memorable event. In FOM’s latest weekly survey (3-5 July), one third of those surveyed who named any events again referred to the petrol crisis, despite the fact that information about it has been heavily restricted in Russia’s censored media environment. However, we also see that the theme of the Russian army’s military successes in Ukraine (‘we’ve given the Ukrainians a beating’, ‘We’re taking Kostiantynivka’, ‘our forces are winning in the Special Military Operation’), which the Kremlin aggressively promoted throughout June, remains present on the agenda as a counterbalance to the petrol shortage and the successes of Ukrainian drones. In the latest survey, this theme was reinforced by a televised report on 3 June covering Putin’s meeting with generals in a command bunker.
Nevertheless, the overall emotional climate remains distinctly negative. In FOM’s weekly polling, 54% of those surveyed report that anxiety predominates among the people around them, while only 38% perceive a calm atmosphere. In 2025, the pattern was reversed: 40% saw anxiety around them, whereas 54% reported a generally calm environment. Given that the composition of survey samples is likely to be skewed towards more loyal respondents, these figures probably present a somewhat moderated picture of underlying public sentiment.
Table 1. Memorable events in late June–early July 2026, %
The ‘loyalty buffer’ has virtually been exhausted
Throughout June, the ‘bubble of support’, that is the surge of heightened loyalty that had appeared in survey data after the start of the war, continued to deflate (→ Re:Russia: How Much Has The Bubble of Excessive Support Deflated?). As a reminder, after the start of the war, just as after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, opinion polls recorded a sharp increase in the share of highly loyal respondents who declared support not only for Putin but for virtually all state institutions and the agendas they promoted, while also expressing complete satisfaction with the direction in which the country was developing. In non-authoritarian countries, a similar shift in public attitudes during an external conflict is usually explained by the ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect. In an authoritarian and repressive context, however, it reflects both a degree of genuine mobilisation among supporters of the authorities and the ‘spiral of silence’ effect, whereby those who disagree with the official line refrain from expressing their views publicly, including by declining to participate in surveys that many of those surveyed perceive as a form of non-private communication.
Accordingly, the current deflation of the bubble points to an erosion of loyalty within the more conformist segment of Russian society, which is disproportionately represented among survey participants. A month ago, we noted clear signs of this process, while also observing that the FOM and Levada Center data suggested that the erosion had not yet significantly affected Putin personally: the contraction of his individual ‘bubble of support’ lagged behind the reassessment of other state institutions and of the country’s overall situation.
It is now possible to conclude that the erosion has fully spread to the president as well. According to Levada Center data, the decline in assessments of the country’s situation, of almost all state institutions, and of Putin himself became synchronised in June and continued to deepen (Figure 1). FOM data likewise shows that both assessments of the president’s performance and the level of trust in him have also fallen by approximately 10 percentage points compared with figures from late 2025 to early 2026. Overall, the indicators of loyalty to the authoritarian regime in June 2026 had returned to approximately the levels observed at the start of the war. In other words, by this point almost the entire ‘surplus’ of heightened wartime loyalty has been exhausted.
Figure 1. Two bubbles of surplus support: 2014–2018 and 2022–2026, % of those surveyed
This picture is complemented by a sharp decline in the Levada Center’s consumer sentiment index. As recently as the first half of 2025, the index stood at 115 points. By February 2026 it had fallen to 104, and it has now dropped to 94, returning to its pre-war level. Notably, eight points of this decline occurred in the most recent survey alone. It should be noted that a comparable index by ‘inFOM’ (the FOM survey conducted on behalf of the Central Bank) also experienced a substantial decline at the beginning of 2026, but it remains above pre-war levels. However, the June inFOM survey was conducted during the first ten days of the month, whereas the Levada Center survey took place during the final week. Experience with these indices suggests that current social moods, including those shaped by a negative information environment, can significantly affect even retrospective assessments of the personal financial circumstances of those surveyed, let alone their expectations for the future. In this case, moreover, the petrol shortages and sharp price increases at the end of the month undoubtedly constituted a direct source of economic discomfort for those surveyed.
Figure 2. Levada Center Consumer Sentiment Index, 2014–2026, points
Figure 3. Components of the ‘inFOM’ Consumer Sentiment Index, 2013–2026, points
Two waves of frustration and a communication vacuum
Taking the broader trajectory of public sentiment over recent months together, the first wave of anxiety and deterioration in social mood occurred in the second half of April and early May. It was associated with Ukrainian drone attacks and with the authorities’ increasingly alarmist reaction to the forthcoming military parades, including widespread cancellations. By late May and early June, public sentiment had stabilised somewhat, but in the second half of June it began to deteriorate rapidly once again amid a flood of news about further Ukrainian strikes, the effective blockade of Crimea, and the escalating fuel crisis.
This second surge of anxiety and social frustration in June appears to have broader political implications. Its effects are visible across a wider range of evaluations, including attitudes towards the president, the economic situation, and the country’s future prospects. At the same time, the authorities’ attempts to restrict information about the strikes and the scale of the crisis on social media appear to have had only limited success. The Levada Center’s June survey indicates that restrictions on uncensored platforms (such as YouTube and Telegram) have led to a noticeable decline in the proportion of those surveyed who identify them as sources of information. This may partly reflect the fact that respondents increasingly perceive these platforms as targeted or effectively prohibited and are therefore less willing to admit that they continue to use them. In any case, while these changes may have reduced the scale of public panic to some extent, they have not halted its spread.
Figure 4. Trends in mentions of the most important sources of information about events at home and abroad, %
It is important to note that television’s share of Russians’ information landscape continues to decline. The war has dealt a serious blow to the Kremlin television machine, stripping it of its dominant role in shaping the information agenda and effectively turning it into a niche medium aimed primarily at older audiences, while reaching very few people aged 18-35 (→ Re:Russia: The War Has Killed Television). A return to television is unlikely even if Russians were completely deprived of access to Telegram. The clearest evidence for this is that trust in television as a source of news is now declining even faster than the size of its audience.
As can be seen in Figure 5, after a period of relative stability, trust in television began to fall noticeably from the end of last year. This coincided with the failure of Russia’s offensive in the Donbas to achieve significant results, even as the authorities, and Putin personally, continued to insist otherwise and to promote the supposed successes of Russian forces. Particularly striking is that the decline in trust is evident across all age groups. Indeed, it is especially pronounced among both the youngest and the oldest of those surveyed, with declines of 8 percentage points and 9 percentage points respectively. The erosion of loyalty is therefore beginning to extend even to pensioners, traditionally the most pro-Putin segment of Russian society.
Figure 5. Decline in trust in television, 2024–2026, % of those surveyed
Figure 6. Decline in trust in television, 2024–2026, % of those surveyed by age group
More broadly, against the backdrop of the dramatic developments surrounding the petrol crisis and the lockdown of Crimea, the Russian authorities have effectively been left without reliable channels through which to communicate their preferred interpretation of events. Having blocked Telegram and substantially reduced their own activity there, while the state-backed platform ‘Max’ remains dysfunctional, the Kremlin lacks an effective means of shaping the public narrative. For the moment, however, there is scarcely any coherent narrative to promote. President Putin continues to insist that nothing particularly serious is happening and that the current difficulties are merely temporary and will soon be overcome. The current situation can be described as a breakdown of the authoritarian equilibrium that became firmly established around the second year of the war. Never before, it seems, has the arsenal of information manipulation, traditionally one of the principal strengths of Putin’s autocracy, been so weakened at such an inopportune moment.
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