Vladimir Putin's approval rating has fallen for a seventh consecutive week to its lowest level since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to data from VTsIOM, the state-owned polling agency whose numbers the Kremlin monitors closely and whose methodology has every incentive to flatter the president.

The latest VTsIOM survey, conducted between April 13 and 19, found that almost a quarter of Russians (24.1%) do not trust Putin, while nearly a third (31.1%) disapprove of the activities of the Russian government. Both figures are up around seven percentage points since February and represent the lowest ratings for Putin and his administration since the start of the war.

The Reuters figure puts Putin's current approval at 65.6%, down from 73.3% in March. According to the state pollster, in the past three months the president's rating has fallen by 7.3 percentage points, while disapproval has increased by 5.7 percentage points. Putin's approval jumped to just below 80% after the invasion of Ukraine and stayed well above 75% for most of the war, dipping only briefly after the mobilisation announcement in 2022.

The ruling party United Russia has also been hit, with its approval rating dropping to 27.3%. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin's trust rating fell to 53.8%. Dmitry Medvedev's rose to 36.8%, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov's to 32.7% and Just Russia's Sergei Mironov's to 29.8% — a pattern that suggests voters are shopping around within the approved political spectrum.

The internet that broke the spell

The proximate cause of the decline is not the war, inflation or the banking sector strains documented elsewhere — it is something more mundane and more viscerally felt by the urban middle class that has historically sustained Putin's support: the internet is broken.

A political consultant working with Russia's Presidential Administration told Meduza that the Kremlin's approval ratings are falling, citing public frustration over the blocking of messaging service Telegram and restrictions on mobile internet access as among the reasons, while stressing other factors were also at play.

"Too much [negative] is happening at once — from rising prices to growing war fatigue. It's hard to say how much of that is down to the restrictions specifically," he said, as cited by the Kyiv Post.

Russians love their tech but a government crackdown on the so-called RuNet has made those services deeply unreliable. Bank apps and ride-hailing applications do not always work. E-government Gosuslugi services are glitchy. In the regions of Russia’s hinterland, residents have no reliable way of receiving real-time information about Ukrainian drone attacks — one of the more pointed ironies of a crackdown justified on national security grounds.

The public backlash is forcing a Kremlin rethink. While the Kremlin cracks down hard on political opposition dissent, when it comes to gripes by the population over more non-political mundane issues it is a lot more cautious and often compromises.

The push by Russia's FSB security service for tougher controls over RuNet has prompted some top officials to warn of political and economic risks from barring access to popular online services, according to people familiar with the discussions, reports The Bell. That is likely to slow the crackdown, allowing Telegram to continue functioning in Russia, those people said.

The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has already issued a temporary ruling that companies will not face penalties for advertising on Telegram and YouTube until the end of the year — a tacit acknowledgement that forcing an immediate advertising exodus is impractical.

Putin himself acknowledged the problem on April 23, saying that internet outages were “necessary” for security reasons, but that law enforcement officials must show "ingenuity" to find solutions and guarantee the functioning of vital healthcare and government services. The remark was a rare public concession that the security services had overreached.

Zyuganov's 1917 warning

Against this backdrop, the language being used in Russia's public sphere has shifted in ways that would have been unthinkable two years ago. Veteran Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov did not mince his words when he addressed the State Duma earlier this week. "By autumn a repeat of what happened in 1917 awaits us," the 81-year-old told parliament. "We don't have the right to repeat that."

It has been years, if not decades, since such language has been heard from the floor of Russia's parliament, Owen Matthew, a veteran Russia reporter, said in a column in The Daily Telegraph. Zyuganov was at pains to add that "we're doing everything we can to support Putin and his strategy and policies, but [the government] are not listening" — framing his warning as counsel from a loyalist, not a challenge from an opponent. But the invocation of 1917 in the Duma, in the year before a parliamentary election, is a signal that cannot be entirely managed away.

Ahead of those Duma elections, due by late September, at least 46 applications to hold protest rallies have been rejected by authorities across Russia, mostly on technicalities. In Tomsk, Kaluga, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Sochi and Murmansk, activists and protest organisers have been detained, fined or threatened. Some smaller protests went ahead regardless.

The influencer rebellion

More striking than any formal opposition is the emergence of public dissent from figures who have never previously challenged the Kremlin — and who frame their criticism in terms carefully calibrated to avoid crossing the line into anti-war sentiment.

Former Russian Big Brother star and high-profile model Victoria Bonya posted a video address to Putin warning that "the people are afraid of you, entertainers are afraid, governors are afraid. There is a big wall between you and the people." She added that "people will stop being afraid and they're being squeezed into a coiled spring and that one day that coiled spring will explode."

Bonya lives in Monaco, but her video was viewed more than 25mn times. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov took it seriously enough to issue a statement assuring Russians that many of her criticisms were being "actively worked on."

Once-loyalist actor Ivan Okhlobystin has railed against internet shutdowns as "a huge mistake" and blasted the government for wanting to "bring us back to the USSR." Former Duma deputy Nikolai Bondarenko posted a rant against a government that had brought "this incredibly rich country full of oil and gas and all kinds of resources to the edge of bankruptcy."

Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of Telegram, has also unusually vocally criticised the Kremlin, at what he described as the Putin regime's “propaganda operations”, revealing that over 90% of votes in a poll supporting his platform were generated by automated accounts.

None of this constitutes a revolutionary threat. All of the celebrity critics have carefully framed their appeals as being addressed to a good tsar surrounded by bad advisers – and aged old refrain in Russia -- and all have avoided any direct criticism of the war in Ukraine — the one line that savage prosecutions, including the murder in custody of opposition figure Alexei Navalny in 2023, have made clear remains uncrossable.

"The concern for the Kremlin is that this crackdown on the internet becomes a lightning rod for wider discontent that's already there below the surface," The Bell said in a commentary.

What has changed is that criticism of the government has become normalised across every stratum of Russian society — from glamorous influencers in Monaco to military Z-bloggers recording their rants from inside their cars.

With an economy straining after more than four years of endless war, a banking sector showing the first signs of systemic stress, and an internet crackdown that has antagonised the very urban class that has historically been most compliant, the edifice of Putin's invincibility is developing unmistakable cracks — visible even in the polling data of his own state pollsters.