Transcription
86% that is how many Russians approved of Vladimir Putin in June 2025, not according to the Kremlin, according to Levada Center, the independent polling organization that Putin's own government tried to silence. This video is not about whether Putin is a good leader. It is about something Western media has refused to explain: why 140 million people living under a government CNN calls a dictatorship support their leader at rates most Western democracies can only dream of.
The answer will force you to confront things about the 1990s, about Iraq, about Libya, things that are inconvenient for everyone. By the time this video ends, you will not just understand why Russians support Putin. You will understand why the West has been asking the wrong question for 20 years, and that may be the most uncomfortable truth of all.
To understand why Russians support Putin, you first have to understand what happened to Russia before Putin, and Western media almost never tells you this part of the story. The year is 1991. The Soviet Union has just collapsed. Western economists, American advisers, and IMF officials flood into Moscow with a promise. They call it reform. They call it freedom. They call it the path to prosperity. What they actually implement is something called shock therapy: the rapid dismantling of the entire state-controlled economy overnight with no safety net in place.
Within 7 years, Russia's GDP contracts by 40%, not 20%, not 30%, 40%. To put that in context, the United States during the Great Depression lost 27% of its GDP over 4 years. Russia lost more than that in less time, and nobody called it a depression. They called it a transition. The human cost is staggering. Male life expectancy in Russia falls to 59 years by 1993, not 65, not 60, 59, lower than Bolivia, lower than Egypt, lower than dozens of countries the West categorizes as underdeveloped. The suicide rate rises 60% from 1989 levels. HIV spreads faster in Russia during this period than anywhere else on Earth. Infant mortality climbs. Entire cities built around single Soviet-era factories simply stop functioning when those factories close.
And while ordinary Russians are losing everything, a small group of men is getting rich beyond imagination. The privatization process, designed with direct input from American advisers from Harvard, a fact that is rarely mentioned in Western coverage, creates what becomes known as the oligarchs. State assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars are transferred to connected insiders for fractions of their real value. The seven men who end up controlling Russia's largest industries become known as the "semibankirshchina," the seven bankers. They fund Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign directly. They own the television networks. They shape what Russians see and hear.
Jeffrey Sachs, one of the American economists who helped design the shock therapy reforms, later admitted publicly that the program failed in Russia not because the theory was wrong, but because the West never provided the financial support it promised. His explanation is precise and damning: the United States viewed Poland as an ally and Russia as an adversary. So Poland received backing, and Russia received advice.
Russians have a word for this decade: "katastrofa," catastrophe. Not recession, not hardship, catastrophe. And that word matters because it is the emotional foundation on which everything that follows is built. When Vladimir Putin becomes acting president at the end of 1999, Russia is a country in ruins. The state has lost control of Chechnya. The military is underfunded and demoralized. Pensioners sell their possessions on street corners to survive. The average Russian has watched their savings wiped out twice: first by hyperinflation, then by the 1998 ruble collapse.
Here is what Western analysts consistently miss: the Russians who support Putin today are not voting on abstract political philosophy. They are not choosing between competing models of governance. They are making a decision shaped entirely by lived memory, and the memory that shapes them most is not the Cold War, not World War II. It is the 1990s, the decade when the West told them that freedom was coming, and what arrived instead was catastrophe.
This is what I call the "katastrofa contract." It is not a formal agreement. It is the unspoken understanding that runs through Russian political culture: we will support whoever keeps us from going back there, not because we are told to, not because we don't know better, because we remember. The West broke its promise in the 1990s. Putin kept his. That is not propaganda. That is the lived experience of 140 million people, and you cannot understand the 86% until you understand that.
Before we continue, did you know the West helped design Russia's economic collapse in the 1990s? Comment one if you knew this, zero if this is the first time you're hearing it.
Vladimir Putin becomes acting president of Russia on December 31st, 1999. He inherits a country that has lost 40% of its GDP, a military that cannot win a war in its own territory, and a population that has watched two generations of savings disappear. By any conventional political standard, the situation is not recoverable.
What happens next is the part of the story that Western coverage almost always skips. Between 1999 and 2008, Russia's GDP grows by 94%. The value of the Russian economy rises from $210 billion to $1.8 trillion. Real wages double. Poverty rates fall sharply. For the first time in a decade, Russian pensioners receive payments on schedule. For the first time in a decade, the Russian state can pay its military, its teachers, its doctors.
This is not a claim from Russian state media. These numbers come from the Moscow Times, from Heritage Foundation analysis, from IMF data. The growth is real, documented, and for the generation that lived through the 1990s, nothing short of miraculous. Putin does not achieve this through political genius alone. The rise in global oil prices through the early 2000s provides the revenue base, but the management of that revenue, the decision to build a stabilization fund, to pay down foreign debt, to reinvest in social infrastructure, is a deliberate policy choice. And for ordinary Russians, the distinction between good luck and good management matters far less than the outcome. The lights stay on. The heat works. The salary arrives.
Here is the data point that Western commentators find most difficult to process: In June 2025, Levada Center, not the Kremlin, not Russian state television, but the independent polling organization that Putin's own government has labeled a foreign agent, measures Putin's approval rating at 86%. After 3 years of war in Ukraine, after the most severe sanctions regime in modern history, after tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died, 86%.
The standard Western explanation for this number is propaganda. Russians are fed only state media. They don't know the truth. They are afraid to tell pollsters what they really think. There is something to this argument. Research from Carnegie Moscow Center suggests that between a quarter and a third of Putin's supporters back him partly because there is no visible alternative. Social desirability bias is real. People in authoritarian systems sometimes give the safe answer rather than the true one. A 2025 analysis in the Journal of Democracy notes that Russian attitudes toward the war itself are more ambivalent than the approval rating suggests.
But here is the problem with the propaganda explanation as a complete answer: Levada Center is the organization Putin's government has tried hardest to discredit and suppress. If the numbers were pure fabrication, there would be no reason to fear the organization producing them. And the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, using Levada data from 2023, finds that 69% of Russians believe the annexation of Crimea brought more benefit than harm to Russia. 62% believe Russia should play an active role in world affairs. These are not the attitudes of a population that has been simply told what to think. These are the attitudes of people who have formed a judgment based on experience.
The judgment goes something like this: In 1991, we were told that a new system would bring prosperity. It brought catastrophe. In 2000, one leader changed that trajectory. The evidence is not abstract. It is the difference between a functioning pension and no pension at all. This is the rescue mandate. It is not unconditional. It is not eternal. But it is based on something that propaganda cannot manufacture: memory of what came before. When you understand that, the 86% stops being a mystery. It becomes, if anything, predictable. You don't vote against the person who pulled you out of the rubble, not when you still remember what the rubble felt like.
There is a question that almost never gets asked in Western coverage of Russia, not because it is difficult to ask, because the answer is inconvenient. The question is this: When Russians look at the West's conduct on the world stage over the past 30 years, what exactly do they see? Let me walk you through what the view looks like from Moscow.
March 24th, 1999. NATO begins bombing Yugoslavia. No United Nations Security Council resolution authorizes the campaign. Russia and China bring a draft resolution to the Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire. 12 of 15 members vote against it. The bombing continues for 78 days. Serbian civilians die. Infrastructure across Yugoslavia is destroyed. When Russia's representative speaks before the Security Council, he says that those who vote against the resolution are placing themselves in a state of lawlessness. The West calls it a humanitarian intervention. Russia calls it an illegal war. Neither characterization is entirely wrong, but the lesson Russians take from 1999 is precise: When the West decides military action is justified, the UN Security Council is irrelevant. The rules apply to everyone else.
Then comes February 5th, 2003. Colin Powell stands before the United Nations General Assembly. He holds up a vial and tells the world that Iraq possesses biological weapons. He plays audio recordings. He shows satellite imagery. He says the evidence is beyond doubt. Six weeks later, the United States invades Iraq without a second Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. No weapons of mass destruction are ever found. Conservative estimates put the Iraqi civilian death toll from the war and the chaos that follows at over 200,000 people. The power vacuum created by dissolving Iraq's military produces the conditions in which ISIS eventually forms, controls territory the size of Great Britain, and generates over a billion dollars a year in revenue. The war that was supposed to reduce threats in the Middle East ends up dramatically expanding Iran's regional influence. The West calls it a mistake. Russia calls it exactly what it predicted.
Then Libya. 2011. A UN Security Council resolution authorizes a no-fly zone to protect civilians in Benghazi. NATO interprets this mandate as license to provide close air support for rebel forces, destroy Gaddafi's army, and enable regime change. Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled for 42 years, is captured and killed by a mob on the street. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, hearing the news on camera, laughs. "We came, we saw, he died," she says. Six years later, CNN journalists film African migrants being auctioned as slaves in open-air markets in Libya. The country that NATO liberated has become a failed state where human beings are sold for $400.
Now, hold those three images together: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya. And ask the question that Russians ask: When Western governments say they are intervening to protect international order, to defend human rights, to uphold the rules-based system, what is the track record of those interventions? When Western governments say that Russia's actions in Ukraine violate sovereignty and international law, what does Russia see when it looks at Kosovo, at Baghdad, at Benghazi?
This is the mirror test. It is not a defense of Putin's decisions. It is not a justification for the invasion of Ukraine. It is an explanation of why 140 million Russians do not accept the West as a credible moral authority on questions of sovereignty and international law. When someone who bombed Yugoslavia without UN approval, invaded Iraq based on fabricated evidence, and turned Libya into a slave market tells you that you are the threat to international order, you do not feel guilt. You feel something closer to disbelief.
Belt and Road creates debt. It doesn't create loyalty. The West taught that lesson first with different tools in different countries. Russia simply learned it from watching.
Now, I want to do something that most analysts on either side of this debate refuse to do. I want to tell you what the Western critics of Putin get right, because they do get some things right. The social desirability effect in Russian polling is real. When you live in a country where political opposition has been systematically eliminated, where Alexei Navalny died in a prison camp, where expressing dissent on social media can result in a criminal charge, some percentage of people who tell a pollster they support Putin are giving the safe answer, not the true one. We do not know exactly how large that percentage is, but it exists.
The economic foundation of Putin's mandate is also fracturing. The Russian economy grew by 3.6% in 2024, but that growth was driven almost entirely by wartime military spending, not productive investment, not consumer confidence, not innovation. By 2025, GDP growth has fallen to 0.6%. The European Parliament's analysis suggests that 2026 may bring outright recession. The budget deficit is widening, inflation is persistent. The war is consuming resources that would otherwise fund the social programs that form the core of Putin's domestic legitimacy.
And the propaganda apparatus is real. Russian state television did shape public opinion after 2022 in ways that independent research confirms. The rally around the flag effect following the invasion was genuine, and it was amplified by a media environment designed to amplify it.
So, yes, the Western critique contains truth, but here is what Washington and Brussels have consistently refused to understand, and what makes the critique ultimately insufficient as an explanation: Even if you discount the polling numbers by 20 percentage points for fear and social pressure, you are still looking at majority support. Even if you factor in the propaganda effect, you are still explaining a country where the "katastroika" contract, the lived memory of the 1990s, provides an independent reason for loyalty that has nothing to do with television. Even if Putin's economic performance is deteriorating now, it was real for a decade, and the people who benefited from it remember. And the mirror test does not disappear because of propaganda. Yugoslavia happened, Iraq happened, Libya happened. Those are facts that exist independent of Russian state media. Any Russian with an internet connection can read the UN Security Council vote records from March 1999. Any Russian can watch Hillary Clinton's video from October 2011. The information is there. The conclusion Russians draw from it is not manufactured. It is a rational response to observable events.
This is the synthesis that neither side wants to make. Russian support for Putin is not a simple product of brainwashing. It is a layered phenomenon built on three foundations that are independent of each other:
1. The "katastroika" contract: We remember what the alternative looked like, and we will not go back.
2. The rescue mandate: The evidence of economic recovery is real, and it happened.
3. The mirror test: The West's credibility as a moral authority is undermined by its own documented record.
You can disagree with each of those foundations. You can argue that the 1990s would have resolved differently with more time. That Putin's economic gains came with unacceptable political costs. That NATO's interventions, however flawed, were motivated by genuine humanitarian concern. All of those arguments are legitimate, but you cannot dismiss the foundations themselves. And that is exactly what Western coverage has been doing for 20 years.
Here is the question that this synthesis produces: If you lived through the 1990s in Russia, and you watched Iraq, and you watched Libya, would you find the Western argument persuasive? Not ideologically, not theoretically, in your bones, based on what you have seen?
Understanding why people support something is not the same as endorsing it. But refusing to understand it is how you guarantee you will never solve it. We started this video with a number, 86%, and we have spent the last 20 minutes building toward an answer that most Western analysis never reaches. The support is real. It is not uniform. It is not unconditional. But it is built on foundations: memory, evidence, and a coherent, if contested, worldview, that dismissing as propaganda does not make disappear.
So, where does that leave us? Because understanding the present is only useful if it tells us something about what comes next. Three scenarios are now in motion simultaneously, and which one dominates will determine the next decade of Russian politics.
The first scenario: The current trajectory continues. Western governments maintain the sanctions regime and the framing that Russian support for Putin is a product of propaganda rather than experience. Putin continues to use the mirror test (Kosovo, Iraq, Libya) as the dominant justification for Russia's actions. The "katastroika" contract holds because no credible alternative emerges inside Russia, and the war in Ukraine continues to generate the rally-around-the-flag effect that sustains approval numbers. In this scenario, the support does not collapse. It becomes institutionalized across a generation.
The second scenario: Negotiation. A diplomatic settlement over Ukraine forces both sides to acknowledge things their domestic media cannot say. The West would need to admit that NATO expansion was not as consequence-free as it claimed. Russia would need to admit that its military campaign has caused civilian suffering at a scale that no security justification covers. Both acknowledgements are politically toxic in their respective media environments. But the alternative, permanent conflict, carries its own costs. This is the scenario that would actually reduce the utility of the mirror test because it would require the West to demonstrate that it can apply rules to itself.
The third scenario is the one that the Kremlin fears most and discusses least. The Russian economy enters genuine recession in 2026. Military spending crowds out the social programs, pensions, health care, family benefits, that form the actual lived experience of the rescue mandate. The catastrophic contract does not require support for a war. It requires that the leader keep Russia from going back to the 1990s. If the economic conditions of the 1990s begin returning, real wage declines, pension instability, rising unemployment, the contract is broken, not by Western pressure, by arithmetic.
The real question is not whether Putin is a good leader. History will deliver that verdict in time. The real question is whether the West is capable of understanding why 140 million people disagree with its assessment. And what that understanding might actually cost them, because the cost is not trivial. It would require looking at Kosovo, at Baghdad, at Benghazi, and saying something other than what Western governments have been saying for 20 years. That may be the most uncomfortable truth in this entire video. Not that Russians support Putin, but that the West's inability to understand why they do has made every policy designed to change it less effective than it could have been.
If this video changed the way you see Russia, even slightly, hit the like button. And subscribe if you want analysis that goes where mainstream media won't. Now, I want to hear from you. Do you think Western media has been honest about why Russians support Putin? Comment one if you think there is more to the story. Comment zero if you think the propaganda explanation is sufficient.
In the next video, I will break down what happens to Russia's domestic support if the economy enters recession in 2026, and why that scenario may be more dangerous for the West than anyone in Washington is currently admitting.