Putin’s war is losing one of its most important weapons: the feeling that it belongs to everyone.

For years, the Kremlin wrapped the invasion in collective language. It was our boys, our front, our fight, our historic mission. That word — our — did the moral laundering. It turned one man’s decision into a national duty and made obedience feel like patriotism.

But a war can be forced on a country more easily than it can be absorbed by it.

Russian society was never truly asked whether it wanted this invasion. People were handed a script and told to perform it. Some did it with conviction, some for profit, and many because in Russia the safest answer to power has always been: yes, of course, whatever you say.

Now that performance is wearing thin.

The war has lasted too long to remain distant. It has entered ordinary life, narrowed the future, and made the old question harder to avoid: why is this supposed to be mine?

A dictatorship can demand silence. It can punish protest. It can stage loyalty. But it cannot easily make people love a burden that keeps making their lives smaller.

Today, I want to show you how Russians are beginning to distance themselves from Putin’s war — not openly, not heroically, but because the cost of pretending has become harder to bear.

Here’s our roadmap:

• The Ritual of Yes — how forced loyalty turns into quiet withdrawal
• Losing Emotional Ownership — what Russians say publicly, and what they want privately
• Repression Without Purpose — why loyalty without a future becomes an ideological dead end
• The Lost Mirror — how breaking with the West left Russia without a useful identity
• Freedom Is Control — how Russians experience losing the internet and basic rights
• The Final Zugzwang — why every move Putin makes now deepens the decay

The Ritual of Yes

When people speak about Russian “support” for the war, we have to be careful.

There is, of course, a loud minority that identifies with it. Some believe the imperial myth. Some enjoy the feeling of revenge. Some benefit from the war economy, from state contracts, promotions, military salaries, or the intoxicating closeness to power.

But this minority is not the whole country.

For many Russians, the response was never true enthusiasm. “Yes, boss. Do what you want. We support you. Just please leave us alone.”

This is not moral courage. But it is also not the same as ideological devotion. It is a survival reflex.

For centuries, Russian people were trained to understand that open disagreement with power could ruin your life. Serfdom taught obedience to the master. Soviet terror turned that obedience into a second nature. The safest answer was rarely the honest answer. The safest answer was the answer expected from you.

This is why Russian polls must be read like documents produced under pressure. When a person in an authoritarian country tells an unknown interviewer that he supports the army, that answer may mean belief. It may also mean fear, fatigue, habit, confusion, or a desire to end the conversation safely.

Real public opinion cannot fully exist where people cannot speak freely. What exists instead is a performance of loyalty.

And for a while, that performance worked because it was just words. Say them and keep living your life.

The war was terrible, but it still felt distant enough for many people to look away. It was on television. It was in Ukraine. It was at the front. It was in someone else’s family.

Then the distance began to collapse.

The war came home through mobilization, funerals, wounded men, rising prices, drone strikes, closed airports, labor shortages, and the growing sense that even the Russian mainland was no longer safely behind the front. What had once been presented as a glorious operation somewhere far away became something that reached into ordinary life.

And when the consequences become unavoidable, the ritual “yes” begins to change. Not into open rebellion, but into withdrawal.

Losing Emotional Ownership

In December 2025, Levada still found that 73 percent supported the actions of the Russian armed forces. On paper, that looks like loyalty. But the same poll showed that 66 percent wanted peace negotiations, while only 25 percent wanted the fighting to continue. That is the real sentence hiding under the official one: we support the army, but please make this end.

Young people are even less attached. Levada found that only 23 percent of Russians under 25 followed events around Ukraine carefully. For the generation that was supposed to inherit Putin’s “new Russia,” this war is mere background noise.

The elites feel it too, only they phrase it more carefully.

Meduza spoke with people close to the Kremlin, the government, parliament, and regional administrations in early 2025. Their mood was disappointment. One government source said fatigue had been the main feeling for a long time. They expected the war to end. They expected sanctions to ease. Instead, the country kept going deeper.

Russian elites no longer see the war as an open road to victory. They see it as a tunnel with no visible exit. They still praise the war in public, donate to military causes, attend patriotic events – because that’s the matter of survival and keeping their position. But their private question is not: “How do we win?” It is: “How do we survive the end?”

That is a very different psychological position.

Ordinary Russians do something similar. They avoid the word “war.” They say “the situation,” “all this,” “what’s happening,” “there.” This is not only self-censorship but emotional distancing. A person who says “our war” accepts ownership. A person who says “all this” leaves a small door open inside himself.

The Kremlin understands this. That is why it keeps trying to stage unity with parades, school lessons, and patriotic concerts. The state keeps saying “we,” because it knows that without “we,” the war becomes naked.

And once the war is naked, people see it for what it is: one aging ruler trapping an entire country inside his personal historical fantasy.

Repression Without Purpose

Repression works best when it points toward a better future for everyone. Some image, however false, that tells people: suffer now, and later your children will thank you.

The Soviet Union understood this. Its future was fake, but it was detailed. Children were told they would live under communism. Workers were told their sacrifices built a new world. Scientists, soldiers, teachers, factory hands — everyone had a place inside the myth of tomorrow.

Putin’s Russia has no such tomorrow.

It has nostalgia, resentment, and endless reruns of its old victory in WWII. And this is the dead end of Putin’s ideology. The regime demands loyalty, but offers no horizon.

What is the promise now? That Russia will keep fighting until Ukraine accepts defeat? That NATO will tremble? That Europe will freeze? That the West will collapse from moral decay while the children of Russian officials keep studying, shopping, and living there when they can?

People are not stupid enough to miss the contradiction forever.

In the early years of Putin’s rule, the bargain was clearer. Give up politics, and you get stability. You can buy a car, vacation in Turkey, take a mortgage, build a comfortable private life.

After 2022, that deal broke.

Now the state says: give up politics, free speech, normal travel abroad and safety at home. Give up your son if needed — and in return, receive what? A larger map on television? A speech about “traditional values”? A medal after death?

This is why repression grows harsher: because belief is getting weaker.

When people truly believe, they police themselves. When they stop believing, the state must police them from outside.

Freedom House rated Russia’s internet “Not Free” in its 2025 report, with the score dropping to 17 out of 100. The report described Russia’s internet freedom as reaching a new low, with attempts to isolate the population from the global internet, outages linked to sovereign internet testing, throttling, blocked critical sites, and prosecutions of online critics.

But here is the absurdity. The more the state controls information, the less confident it looks.

And the repression itself creates a new problem. It teaches citizens not loyalty, but avoidance.

A loyal citizen says: “I believe.” A frightened citizen says: “I won’t talk.” Those are not the same thing. Silence can look like support from a distance, but inside society, it creates emptiness. People stop discussing the future. They stop saying what they think even to relatives. Public life becomes a minefield, so everyone retreats into private survival.

That is how the word “we” dies.

The Lost Mirror

For Russia, the West was not only a key trading partner. It was the mirror in which it recognized itself.

For centuries, Russia built its identity through comparison with Europe. Sometimes it saw the West as a teacher. Sometimes as a rival, a corrupt seducer, or a humiliating judge. But it was always there, giving Russia something to measure itself against.

Peter the Great looked westward when he built his empire. The Russian aristocracy spoke French. The Soviet Union competed with America in space, science, weapons, sports, and ideology. Even anti-Western Soviet propaganda depended on the West. You cannot shout “we will catch up and overtake you” if there is no “you” standing ahead.

Putin’s tragedy is that he wanted recognition from the West while claiming to despise it.

For years, his system worked on a simple split. Ordinary people were told that the West was decadent, hostile, and morally rotten. The elite, meanwhile, sent children to Western schools, bought second homes in Western countries, wore Western brands, and vacationed in Western cities.

Russia could curse the West on television and still live off access to it. That access gave the elite status. It also gave ordinary people a horizon. Even if they never emigrated, they could imagine a better life somewhere abroad.

After 2022, that mirror cracked.

Flights disappeared. Visa doors narrowed. Western companies left. Russian diplomas, passports, bank cards, and even accents became marked by suspicion. For many people, the shock was not only practical but personal.

The regime answered by saying: well, we never really needed them. We will turn East. We will build our own world.

But the new “East” does not offer Russia a replacement identity. China does not admire Russia. China buys Russian oil and gas when the price is right. India does the same. North Korea sends weapons and gets something in return. This is a market, not a friendship.

And ordinary Russians feel the downgrade. The “Global South” is not a cultural dream for most Russians. Nobody in Moscow grows up longing to send their children to a university in Pyongyang.

This creates an identity vacuum.

“Hating the West” does not tell a young Russian who to become. It does not create good universities, livable cities, or a meaningful career. It only gives him an enemy. And an enemy is useful for mobilization, but useless for building a life.

This is where the future dies.

Freedom Is Control

Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has moved step by step toward a closed information space. Instagram and Facebook were blocked in 2022 after Meta was labeled extremist. YouTube was throttled. VPN advertising and instructions were restricted. In July 2025, Russian lawmakers passed legislation punishing people for knowingly searching for “extremist” material online, including through VPNs. In August 2025, authorities restricted calls on WhatsApp and Telegram. Then the state pushed MAX, a government-backed messenger integrated with public services and ordered for pre-installation on phones.

Each step was justified as protection: from fraud, from terrorism, from Western manipulation, from Ukrainian attacks.

Freedom becomes framed as chaos. Privacy becomes framed as suspicion. The citizen is taught to confuse dependence with safety.

But here is the problem for the regime: Every restriction also reminds people that life is shrinking.

Millions of Russians remember what a more open internet felt like. They remember arguing, watching, buying, learning, joking, following foreign creators, calling relatives abroad, and seeing the state from the outside. The regime can make that harder, but it cannot erase the comparison.

And there is another important point.

Russia had grown used to taking pride in its world-class digital services. Russians were not living in the technological Stone Age. They had fast payments, convenient banking apps, delivery platforms, marketplaces, online maps, streaming, messengers, and a digital culture that felt modern and efficient.

So when the state blocks, breaks, or degrades something people use in ordinary life, it does not feel like a small inconvenience. It feels like humiliation.

Something can be taken from you, and you cannot protect it.

In the Russian system of values, that matters deeply. A victim is not automatically seen as innocent. A victim is often seen as a fool — someone who failed to defend themselves.

So the restriction does not only remove a service. It wounds dignity.

Why can a German or an American use Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, normal calls, normal apps, normal access to the world — and we cannot?

It feels as if everyone else was allowed into the party, and Russians were stopped at the door because they were not good enough.

And few things make a person angrier than humiliation. 

That is where the central contradiction appears. The war was sold as a restoration of greatness. It was supposed to return dignity, power, respect, and national pride. But the result is the opposite.

And that is exactly why many people want to distance themselves from the war. Because the war no longer feels like pride. It feels like the thing that made them smaller.

The Final Zugzwang

Putin’s system has reached the point where every move makes its position worse.

In chess, zugzwang means you are forced to move, but every available move damages you. That is where the Kremlin is now. It cannot win cleanly. It cannot stop safely. It cannot turn around and reform.

If Putin escalates, the costs rise — and Russia’s economy is already fragile enough that another major blow could bring it down.

But peace is dangerous too, because peace would force the country to look around and ask simple questions.

What was gained?
What was lost?
Why are hundreds of thousands dead or maimed?
Why are cities poorer, borders harder, factories distorted by military orders, and the future smaller than before?

A victory large enough to justify the losses is out of reach. A defeat is unthinkable. A compromise is politically dangerous.

So the system chooses continuation.

But more and more Russians are quietly choosing something else: to believe that Putin’s personal zugzwang is not their shared destiny.

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