Summary and Key Points: There’s no harder place on earth to take an honest poll than wartime Russia. Answers come wrapped in fear, censorship, and the instinct to repeat the safe official line — many Russians won’t even give their last names to a Western reporter. Which is why a recent finding from one of Russia’s most respected pollsters carries weight: by one measure, the public’s appetite for continuing the war just hit its lowest point since the invasion began in 2022. But it isn’t simply that Russians have turned against the war, because by another measure, most still haven’t.
The Ukraine War: The Difficulties Inherent in Reading Russia
Putin in 2019. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Public discourse in Russia may be shifting, but probably toward a wish for the ongoing war in Ukraine to end, rather than souring on the war itself.
But public opinion polling in Russia is notoriously difficult. How people respond to polls is filtered through the lens of fear and censorship. Many Russians decline to provide their family names when interviewed by Western media outlets out of fear of reprisals. Still, it seems clear that fatigue over the war and a general sense of pessimism may be on the rise, even if support for the war in Ukraine remains relatively high.
Measuring public sentiment in Russia is not as straightforward as it is in the West. Russia is, to put it simply, not a normal polling environment.
One Harvard review of polling early during the war in Ukraine noted that Russian state censorship, self-censorship, and political pressures surrounding the topic of the war make polling difficult to trust at face value. In an authoritarian setting like Russia, people may choose to answer with an overabundance of caution, mask their political opinions — particularly if in opposition to the state’s direction — or, in some cases, repeat the politically safe official stance even if they are not necessarily in agreement.
But the issue is thornier than simply accuracy in polling. Even if respondents’ opinions are genuine, they may not accurately reflect sentiment across polling groups. Some Russians do indeed support the war in Ukraine in the abstract, while simultaneously wishing for a speedy conclusion to hostilities. The question, therefore, is not as simple as “do Russians support the war in Ukraine?” It also includes the follow-up question of “what kind of end to the war, and on whose terms?”
Buk-M2E Air Defense from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Changing Attitudes Toward the War in Ukraine
One perceptible shift in Russian opinions about the war, however, is a seeming desire for a negotiated settlement. A poll by Levada, a leading Russian pollster, reported in March 2026 that just over two-thirds — 67 percent — of Russians supported peace negotiations. Only 24 percent of respondents wanted military operations to continue.
Notably, this was the lowest percentage registered by Levada since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. That study characterized the findings as both a record-high desire for talks and a record low for continued fighting, and is a strong suggestion that the Russian public’s mood is moving toward war exhaustion and away from a preference for endurance.
But those two statistics are not the entire story. Levada also found that support for the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine is far from collapsing. Levada’s findings indicate 73 percent of Russians said they still support the Russian military’s action in Ukraine. Several conclusions can be extrapolated from the data, but one takeaway is that Russians appear to favor the war in principle, but less so than a desire to avoid a rout in Ukraine.
Characterizing the Shift in Opinion
It is tempting to paint this shift in public sentiment as the first signs of a swelling anti-war twist in Russia. But it would be more accurate to characterize the sway in opinion as an erosion of support for the war rather than the first steps toward anything revolutionary.
A synthesis of reporting on independent polling says that attention to the war in Ukraine has dipped, those who do not follow the events there have risen, and overall support of the war has sunk to some of the lowest levels since the war erupted in 2022.
The Russians’ attention is also distracted. In addition to an economy increasingly geared toward furthering the Kremlin’s war aims, increased tax pressure is also of great concern.
Access to fuel has also been crimped in some Russian regions, a consequence of what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dubbed Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions.” GPS disruptions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia’s two main cities, part of an effort to throw Ukrainian strike drones off course, have also been an inconvenience, and a domestic clampdown on internet freedom has been another, perhaps more immediate concern for some.
Russian Mobile ICBM Nuclear Weapons. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
A Cautious Conclusion
Arriving at a concrete conclusion about what the Russian public actually feels and how is exceedingly difficult. But tentative takeaways can be made.
There is relatively strong evidence that the public is becoming weary of the war as it drags on toward its fifth year. But public protest against the war is unlikely in the short term.
Overall fatigue, a desire for peace talks and continued negotiations, and a general decline in attention to the war are discernible trends. But true levels of dissatisfaction with the war are difficult to pin down definitively.
They may be higher than polling suggests.
About the Author: Caleb Larson
Caleb Larson is an American multiformat journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work covers the intersection of conflict and society, focusing on American foreign policy and European security. He has reported from Germany, Russia, and the United States. Most recently, he covered the war in Ukraine, reporting extensively on the war’s shifting battle lines from Donbas and writing on the war’s civilian and humanitarian toll. Previously, he worked as a Defense Reporter for POLITICO Europe. You can follow his latest work on X.
