Overnight, Victoria Bonya went from being a Russian influencer known for exercise routines and cosmetic endorsements into a catalyst for widespread public discontent about the state of her home country’s society and economy.
Bonya, a former television presenter in Russia who now makes a living as an influencer in Monaco, enjoyed the sort of virality most activists and politicians can only dream of in April, when she uploaded a screed critiquing Vladimir Putin’s handling of the Russian economy. The 18-minute video, posted to Instagram, has received around 32 million views and 1.7 million likes.
Bonya’s laundry list of grievances attacked everything from the government’s failed response to extreme flooding in southern Russia earlier this year, to rising inflation and taxes hurting households. The widely viewed and reshared video included a direct message to Putin: “You know what the risk is?” Bonya asked in the video. “That people will stop being afraid, and they’re being squeezed into a coiled spring, and that one day that coiled spring will shoot out.”
While Russians have yet to air their disapproval of the status quo in a Bolshevik-style rebellion (which some Kremlin leaders cautioned to be a real possibility in the turbulent weeks after Bonya’s video went viral), the country’s economy is starting to show strain at the most basic level: its people.
Russians might be famous for their pessimism. Long a middling country in world happiness rankings, cross-cultural studies have shown the archetype of the brooding and gloomy Russian as described by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy might actually be a learned concept. But years into a war that has left Russians excluded from the world and saddled with broken promises from the government, official readings of economic pessimism have recently hit record highs, threatening the Kremlin’s tenuous hold on its society.
Losing the people
Putin might scoff at the idea. Four years on from the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has proved remarkably resilient, shouldering sanctions, rocketing inflation, and depleted fiscal reserves. But Putin’s dogged wartime economy is quickly running out of a resource that has proven vital to shoring up social stability: confidence in their leader that one day, average Russian people’s sacrifices will be worth it.
Russia has recorded a historic rise in economic pessimism this year, according to a Gallup poll published Tuesday. A record 60% of Russians said economic conditions were getting worse, up from 39% last year and the first time in the two decades Gallup has conducted the poll that pessimism represented the majority view. Only 27% of Russians said economic conditions were improving, and 56% considered their living standards to be worsening, also a record high.
Over the course of the war, Russians have been in a sort of social truce with the Kremlin. A concept analysts have termed “everyday patriotism,” the deal allowed Russians to keep living their pre-war lives more or less uninterrupted, as long as they refrained from dissenting against the state or criticizing the war effort.
Russia has been able to weather Western sanctions largely by ramping up trade with non-aligned countries, particularly India and China. Meanwhile, explosive growth in the military economy and stimulus spending on infrastructure and social benefits helped Russian households stay afloat, despite stoking inflation.
Broken promises
But that compact is fracturing. Forced to cover for its military expenses, the Russian government announced hikes to its value added tax last year, rising from 20% to 22%, a move some in Russia saw as a reneging of Putin’s pledge not to raise taxes before 2030. The new taxes have weighed on employment and forced small businesses to shut down.
Those mechanisms are showing signs of severe strain. Russia’s liquid sovereign wealth fund assets are now worth 1.8% of GDP, compared to 6.5% at the start of the war, according to a report published earlier this month by the Kiel Institute, a think tank in Germany. The Kremlin’s fiscal picture has grown increasingly dire too, as its target budget deficit for the year was quickly surpassed within the first quarter.
Oil and gas revenues, one of the only lifelines propping up Russian spending during the war, also collapsed 45% in the first three months of 2026 compared to a year prior, according to the report. Before the war in the Middle East, a global oversupply weighed on demand for Russian crude, while Ukrainian military strikes have been successfully limiting output at Russian refineries for months.
High oil prices due to the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz granted Putin a temporary reprieve, but a labor shortage and constrained manufacturing capacity have complicated the Kremlin’s hopes of funneling more money into its defense sector.
“The fundamental constraint facing Russia today is not access to money but access to people, technology, and productive capacity,” Matthew Klein, an economist and co-author of the Kiel Institute’s analysis, wrote in the report.
“The government can mobilize additional financial resources, but with labor shortages at record levels and sanctions restricting access to critical imports, higher spending increasingly risks generating inflation rather than greater military output,” he added.
For ordinary Russians, the breakdown is reflected in the declining economic mood. The Gallup poll found a rising share of Russians are losing faith in the country’s institutions, including the military and the national government. When asked about their employment prospects, 58% of respondents said it was a bad time to find a job, the highest rate since 2021, when Russian employment was still recovering from the pandemic.
Russia’s economy has been in mostly good health since the war began—sluggish, but never falling prey to the crash many analysts predicted. But faced with glacial progress on front lines in Ukraine, and with Russia’s defenses now dealing with drone attacks striking deep into its territory, Putin’s commitments to keep his war machine running are likely going nowhere. It’s getting harder to finance that effort while also keeping the public on his side.
