Page 27 - RusRPTApr24

2.10 Russians support Putin, but increasingly not the war in Ukraine
In Russia’s presidential election in mid-March, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially won his fifth term with 87 percent of the vote and the highest reported turnout in the country’s post-Soviet history. Indeed, by most measures, Putin remains popular. Opinion surveys just before the election pegged his approval rating above 80 percent, according to an article in Foreign Policy called Putin’s Hidden Weakness: New Evidence Shows Many Russians Support Him—but Not the War.
At the same time, these numbers are far from a reliable indicator of popular support for the war. Many Russians, including Putin voters, are skeptical of the Kremlin’s determination to continue the two-year-old conflict. Although Putin’s approval ratings are impressive, survey data from the Russian Election Study (RES), which we lead, indicate that only a slim majority of his supporters now favor staying the course in Ukraine. In fact, despite the Kremlin’s massive effort to drum up support, nearly one in four Putin backers opposes continuing the war, and roughly the same number say they are unsure whether they support the war (19 percent) or decline to answer the question (four percent). This means that only slightly more than half of Putin supporters—54 percent—think Russia should continue the war that Putin has championed since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Among all Russian voters, support for Putin’s war is even softer. In October 2023, just 43 percent of Russians said they backed continuing what the Kremlin refers to as its “special military operation.” When asked to identify their position on the war, a third of those surveyed chose the response, “No, I do not support the continuation of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine,” and nearly a quarter declined to state an opinion.
The Kremlin works tirelessly to shape these opinions, but its efforts to drive up support for Putin himself have been more successful than its attempts to boost support for the war.
In national surveys conducted around each Russian presidential election in which Putin has featured as a candidate, the team has found that his support is multidimensional. This month’s election supports that pattern. The Russian leader continues to draw on a broad base among ordinary Russians—support built over nearly a quarter century that can prop him up even if many of these backers sour on the war itself. Putin’s appeal also continues to rest on his management of the country’s economy, his hypermasculine image, and—increasingly—his association with conservative values that resonate with many Russian citizens.
Manipulating these other sources of support has been part of Putin’s strategy all along, a tactic often overlooked in Western analyses of Russia’s war strategy. Since the start of the invasion, for example, he has frequently downplayed the so-called special military operation, suggesting that the armed forces will take care of it, leaving most ordinary Russians to go about their lives
27 RUSSIA Country Report April 2024 www.intellinews.com