Russians are waking up to the economic catastrophe of Putin’s war

 When a cohort of truck drivers parked at petrol stations and lay-bys near four Russian air bases last June, it marked the first step in a plan that had been 18 months in the making.

Ukrainian security services were using the vehicles as a modern-day Trojan horse. Fake roofs lifted from the trucks’ cargoes, releasing 117 quadcopter drones.

Remotely controlled through Russia’s mobile telecommunications networks, some of them thousands of miles from the Ukrainian border, these drones flew underneath Russia’s air defences to strike 41 aircraft worth some $7bn.

Attacks such as Operation Spider’s Web have inadvertently done something even more valuable for the Ukrainians than destroy Russia’s military hardware.

Credit: Via Reuters

Last year, Russia’s FSB began a programme of widespread internet shutdowns across the country. Ostensibly, these are to prevent accelerating Ukrainian drone attacks, although they are also part of a snowballing crackdown on information sharing.

However, within Russia, it has started to have unintended consequences.

Daily life for many is disrupted by mobile internet blackouts, leaving citizens routinely unable to make card payments, use online maps, order taxis using their phones, or talk to their families on messaging apps.

The war has suddenly come home for the Russian population in a way that they cannot escape, and it is testing their patience. Social media is filled with criticism, while Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings are plunging.

“People are screaming at the top of their lungs right now. They’ve been robbed of everything they have, and it’s still being taken away,” Victoria Bonya, a Russian blogger who lives in Monaco, warned in a viral 18-minute video address to Putin on Instagram in April.

Credit: Instagram/victoriabonya

Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, says: “Something new is happening. We don’t really understand yet the scale or the danger for the regime. But it is definitely the first time in four years that we can say that there is significant pushback.”

This opposition threatens to gather momentum as the economic catastrophe of Putin’s war becomes increasingly painful.

All at once, the Russian economy is shrinking, its deficit is ballooning, companies and banks are grappling with a wave of bad debt, Ukraine’s attacks keep coming and Putin’s upper hand on the battlefield has disappeared.

In April, Ukraine began clawing back land from the Russians for the first time in nearly three years. In the first 18 days of May, exclusive figures from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) show Ukraine reclaimed nearly 53 square miles.

This means that in less than seven weeks, Ukraine has gained 73pc more territory than Russia claimed in the previous two months. Russia is now losing more men on the battlefield than Putin can recruit. This raises the prospect of forced conscription.

On top of all of this, US-led peace negotiations, which were focused on forcing Ukraine to accept substantial concessions to get a deal over the line, appear to be dead in the water as Donald Trump grapples with the war in Iran.

Earlier this month, Putin made tentative signals that he could be open to negotiations with Europe. The Russian president will never admit it, but he is increasingly trapped.

Trouble at home

Since May 2025, the FSB has been regularly shutting down Russia’s mobile internet. By the end of 2025, there were 2,000 such shutdowns per month in Russia – more than the rest of the world combined in 2024.

This year, the crackdown has only accelerated. In March, the mobile internet was shut off in Moscow for 19 days without explanation. The capital is so digitised that this meant even things such as access to public toilets and parking garages were blocked.

By April, the security services had also almost completely blocked access to Telegram, one of the most popular messaging apps. This ban can be circumvented with virtual private networks, but the authorities are trying to ban these too. Instead, it has rolled out a new state-run messaging app called Max, which is now pre-installed on all phones.

Public criticism of the internet crackdown has been uncharacteristically widespread, overt and scathing.

“We’ll simply fall back into the Stone Age! Are you completely out of your mind, people who are coming up with all this?” Ptakha, a rapper, said in February.

Even Andrei Bezrukov, a retired KGB agent, offered a public rebuke, warning in March: “We’re against our own people, and we’re simply making their lives worse.”

The toll has been particularly acute for small businesses, which rely heavily on Telegram. In April, queues of people lined up outside the presidential administration office in Moscow with petitions for Putin to end the internet shutdown. The owner of a catering company told the BBC: “My business is entirely on the internet. Without internet access, in this form it will not exist.”

Public opinion is suddenly turning against the government. At the end of December, 80pc of Russians said that they trusted Putin, according to polling by VTsIOM, the state-run pollster. In April, this rating hit a wartime low of just 71pc. Approval of his job performance has also slumped to a four-year low.

A separate survey by the independent Levada Center in March found 67pc of Russians thought the country should move towards peace negotiations.

Ms Stanovaya, who is also a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center (CEIP), says: “For me, the most significant thing is the public discourse you can hear from people in Moscow and other cities, who are saying that this policy will kill the Russian economy, that the Russian authorities are not competent, that they are too focused on the war.

“I have not heard this before during the four years of the war. This is the very first time.”

Today, there is still little sign of public protest. However, the disruption is crystallising long-term dissatisfaction. “People are tired of the war. They don’t have an answer about when it ends. It feels like it is endless and it is flowing to everyday life,” says Ms Stanovaya.

“In my opinion, we are at a sort of pivotal point where either the security services will have to double down and crush this resistance, or something must change and the situation in Russia will become more chaotic.”

Crucially, the shutdowns are bringing the war home for the residents of Moscow and St Petersburg, who until now had been largely insulated from it, says Sir Laurie Bristow, who served as British ambassador to Russia from 2016-2020.

The most interesting thing is the extent to which this discontent is flowing into a decline in approval ratings for the government, says Sergey Aleksashenko, who was Russia’s deputy finance minister and the deputy chairman of the Central Bank in the 1990s.

“The private mood of Russians is deteriorating. There is massive discontent and the polls show that this is one of the most serious stories that the Kremlin faces today.”

The FSB’s policy is also causing rifts within the government. The FSB has disrupted the Kremlin’s main channel for political communications with the population before elections for the State Duma in September.

Blocking Telegram also means many Russians can no longer receive warnings of incoming drone attacks and even military staff are struggling with communications problems. Russian air defence units used Telegram to coordinate their responses to Ukrainian drone attacks.

The scale of the disruption that the government is willing to tolerate is telling. It shows just how badly the regime is concerned about public discontent.

In a new paper for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Nigel Gould-Davies, former UK ambassador to Belarus, argues that the Kremlin appears to be laying the groundwork to suppress popular agitation against incoming measures to extract more resources from the economy for the war effort.

There is an even more sinister prospect, Mr Gould-Davies warns. In January, Russia’s ally Iran imposed a nationwide internet shutdown with Russia’s technical assistance, which it used as cover to massacre as many as 30,000 civilians. The biggest question is how far Putin will go to quell dissent.

Spectre of recession

Operation Spider’s Web was just one attack in Ukraine’s programme of deep strikes in Russia, which it has been ramping up dramatically.

Overnight on Saturday, Ukraine launched more than 1,300 long-range drones to Moscow in one of its largest attacks on Russian soil in the war so far.

Many penetrated the city’s heavy air defences, hitting industrial plants and the largest refinery in Moscow for the first time.

Along with the internet shutdowns, strikes such as these are making the war increasingly unavoidable even for residents of Russia’s major cities, says Sir Laurie.

“It’s very, very visible in Moscow and elsewhere, and those things are important.”

Last year, Ukraine hit at least 21 of Russia’s 38 refineries, causing fuel shortages, price rises and long queues of cars at petrol stations.

Now, Ukraine’s intensifying programme of long-range strikes is hurting Putin’s ability to profit from soaring oil prices as a result of the war in Iran.

Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure meant that, between March 25 and April 11, Russia’s oil exports plummeted to 3.5 million barrels per day, down from an average of 5.2 million between January 1 and March 24, according to analysis by Sergey Vakulenko, a CEIP senior fellow. That is a loss of 30 million barrels in foreign sales.

This is not enough to wipe out Putin’s windfall from the war in Iran, which has sent oil prices soaring by 50pc since the end of February and pushed the US to waive sanctions on Russian oil exports. On Wednesday, the UK Government also watered down plans to impose a ban on UK imports of refined products made using Russian crude in third countries as concerns mount over the supply of jet fuel and diesel.

In March, Russia’s oil exports surged from $9.8bn to $19bn, the highest total since 2023, according to the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.

But the Ukrainian attacks hurt, and they are only going to intensify.

“This will build over the summer as Ukraine becomes more effective with their long-range strikes,” says Luke Coffey, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Crucially, the boost to oil revenues from the war in Iran has also been nowhere near enough to rescue Russia from economic malaise. “The expectation was that the war in Iran would give new momentum to Russia and it hasn’t,” says Timothy Ash, associate fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme.

Official data show Russia’s GDP shrank by 0.2pc in the first three months of the year, contracting for the first time since 2023. Earlier this month, the economic ministry cut its forecast for annual GDP growth in 2026 from 1.3pc to 0.4pc. Analysts think the reality will be far worse than officials will admit.

“This is a new, more difficult phase for the Russian economy. Almost every indicator that you can think of for the Russian economy is heading in the wrong direction. Russia is probably already in recession,” says Charles Hecker, an associate fellow in international security at the Royal United Services Institute.