Putin Lacks Support As Only 14 Percent of Russians Back His Foreign Policy

Most Russians who say they support President Vladimir Putin actually don’t back his foreign policy actions, a poll just released showed.

The survey by independent pollster Chronicles seen by Newsweek found that fewer than one-sixth of respondents supported the Russian president’s foreign policy, the most prominent of which is what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation” (SMO) in Ukraine and his anti-Western rhetoric.

Ascertaining genuine public opinion about Putin and the war in Ukraine via state polling carries a health warning given the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.

But Chronicles, a group founded by Aleksei Miniailo, a Russian opposition politician, and a team of sociologists have conducted polls over the last two years that they say present a truer snapshot of public opinion, by asking respondents a series of questions.

Its latest survey of 800 people between September 10 and 17 with a 3.45 percent margin of error used the same wording as a poll by the independent Levada Center about whether they approved of the actions of Russia’s leadership.

The majority (78 percent) said they did approve, which is roughly in line with other national polling. However, follow-up questions showed that this did not mean they backed all of Putin’s actions.

Only 14 percent of respondents who approved of Putin and voted for him in March agreed with his foreign policy positions, the major ones being the war in Ukraine as well his confrontation with the West and anti-Western rhetoric.

“The majority of Russians say that they approve of Putin because it’s what is called in social science a normative position—what a good patriotic citizen should think,” said Miniailo. “The whole resources of the state are directed to create this position.”

“If we look at what people want, they want different things,” he told Newsweek. “The majority doesn’t want what the government is doing and would like different things to happen. The problem is that in authoritarian regimes, people don’t have a lot of power to change their government, unlike in democracies.”

The Chronicles team found that among those who approved of Putin, 61 percent backed a peace treaty with Ukraine with mutual concessions while nearly half (43 percent) wanted to restore ties with the West.

“If a person says that he wants to restore relations with the Western countries, he’s clearly not buying this narrative, and that clearly goes against what Putin is doing de facto,” Miniailo said.

Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of those who backed Putin (83 percent) wanted the government to focus on domestic social and economic problems.

Among those who disapproved of Putin’s performance, 92 percent wanted the government to focus its main efforts on domestic social and economic issues, 79 percent wanted a peace treaty with Ukraine with mutual concessions and 90 percent wanted to restore relations with Western countries.

Putin has earmarked a huge amount of the state budget in the coming years on the military, with a Bloomberg report last month showing that he wants to push up defense spending in 2025, which is already at record levels.

“Putin does say that he does a lot of things to improve things in Russia, but doesn’t do it,” Miniailo said. “Domestic budgets saved for police and the FSB [Russia’s intelligence and security organization] are being reduced, he said, “so once again, de facto he is sacrificing domestic well-being for his foreign policy.”

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.