"Putin Is Already Going All In"
- 21.08.2026, 20:00
Yuri Felshtinsky urges people not to harbor any illusions about Russians.
Amid falling approval ratings for the government, the Kremlin barred the anti-war Yabloko party from the elections, and this incident itself sparked a noticeable surge in anti-war sentiment. Could discontent in Russia escalate into mass protests? The website Charter97.org posed to the well-known historian and journalist Yuri Felshtinsky:
— Let’s start with the slogans. I lived in the Soviet Union, and there were several main slogans in the USSR: “We are for peace” and “We are against war.” And yet the Soviet Union was the most aggressive power in the entire world. As for Yabloko’s political platform, now that a war is already underway in Europe, this is, of course, insufficient. It’s not a radical enough position in the fifth year of the war. Furthermore, as we know, if the Kremlin had allowed the Yabloko party to participate in the elections, it would have had the opportunity to ensure the party received a very low percentage of the vote and still prevent it from entering the Duma. In fact, the Russian leadership is already going all-in in this regard. They don’t care about public opinion. Let’s be frank: there is no freedom of speech in Russia, no freedom of elections, and elections are easily manipulated through absentee voting. The law on remote voting was passed a number of years ago. It allows people to vote remotely and enter any number of votes into the computer at the expense of those who did not show up at the polling stations, making it look like remote voting. None of us have any illusions about this.
The fact that “Yabloko” was specifically removed from the election, on the one hand, shows that someone decided to curry favor with Putin. I am absolutely convinced that, of course, the decision to remove the party from the election was made personally by Putin, given that he has known Grigory Yavlinsky personally for many years. But I don’t think any of this will undermine voters’ faith in anything or even affect Putin’s approval rating.
Moreover, I am absolutely certain that Putin does not care about his approval rating. After all, he relies not on the will of the voters or the opinion of the people, but on state security—the very force that brought him to power and keeps him there. In other words, he relies, one way or another, on the force of arms, and not at all on public opinion, which supports him to one degree or another. And we don’t even know for certain what percentage of the population actually supports Putin. But that doesn’t matter, just as it didn’t matter what percentage of the population actually supported Stalin or Brezhnev. The system of power was structured in such a way that it was irrelevant. Moreover, Russia today exists without the death penalty and with open borders, which means that any serious discontent among the population is most likely expressed by those who leave the country rather than by those who take to the streets to protest. In other words, we saw a certain number of brave souls who came out to defend “Yabloko.” But we need to try to understand what will happen to these brave souls next. All in all, this isn’t a high enough level of protest.
During the protests on Bolotnaya Square , Dmitry Medvedev was told that a million people had taken to the streets. He replied: “Well, hold on. There are 10 million people living in Moscow. Well, 10% came out to protest. They have the right to do so—we’re a democratic country—but that’s only 10%.” You see, no protest movement, measured in percentages, ever reaches a level high enough to claim that the majority of the population is opposed. Even during the most active months of protest, that percentage never represented a majority of the population. That’s never the case. Simply because the population—including infants—can’t take to the streets to protest.
I don’t think Putin is all that concerned about any of this. Let’s be honest—he doesn’t believe in it at all. Putin has been in power for more than a quarter of a century; he has established a stable regime, and no one can really do anything to him. Now he’s waging a series of unsuccessful wars. The 2014 campaign—if you don’t count the annexation of Crimea—was a failure. And the 2022 campaign, which is still ongoing, is in fact an absolute failure. It can’t be said that he’s losing these wars at this very moment, but he certainly isn’t winning them anymore. Nevertheless, the regime exists, the country exists, and there is no visible opposition. But all of this is partly because the situation is determined solely by Moscow. And if you talk to Muscovites, until the recent strike on the oil refinery and the lines for gas, they didn’t feel the war at all. In reality, they were living it up off the war, because all government contracts mean serious money, and all that money is concentrated in Moscow. All businesses are in Moscow; all commercial activity in the Russian capital; all leadership; all accounts—everything is in Moscow. And just as the capital thrived on the hardships of the provinces in peacetime, so too does it thrive on them now—or perhaps even more so now, during wartime.
Therefore, as long as this Moscow calm and prosperity—against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and the rest of Russia—remains undisturbed, I don’t think it will be possible to bring about any turning point in what is happening in the state called “Russia”—which is, in reality, the state called “Moscow.”