After four years of war, cracks are beginning to show across Russia. From unprecedented internet shutdowns and growing public frustration to economic strain, battlefield setbacks, and falling trust in Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin faces mounting pressure on multiple fronts. In this video, we examine the warning signs emerging inside Russia, what they reveal about the state of the war, and whether Putin's grip on power is becoming more fragile than ever before.
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NewsTranscript
00:00For four long years, Russian President Vladimir Putin kept making and breaking promises.
00:05He told the Russian people that the war was far away, that life would go on more or less
00:09as normal, that the sacrifices would be made by other men in other places.
00:14And for four long years, most Russians believed him, or at least tolerated the lie, since
00:19life hadn't changed that much in the first years.
00:22But it seems like Russia is reaching a breaking point, and fast.
00:26So today, we're going to walk through exactly why, and what it might mean for the man in
00:31the Kremlin, who built his entire reputation on never appearing weak.
00:35Let's start with the internet, which sounds almost trivial against the backdrop of tanks,
00:40drones and missiles.
00:41Since 2025, Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, has been shutting down the country's
00:48mobile internet on a scale never seen before.
00:51The official explanation was security.
00:53Ukrainian drones were navigating using Russian cellular networks, and cutting the signal
00:58was meant to blind them.
00:59But the shutdowns quickly became something larger than air defense.
01:03They became a tool of control, part of a widening crackdown on the free flow of information
01:08inside Russia.
01:09And the numbers are staggering.
01:11By the end of 2025, Russia was recording roughly 2,000 mobile internet shutdowns every single
01:17month.
01:18To put that in perspective, that's more shutdowns than the entire rest of the world combined
01:22experienced in all of 2024.
01:25Then it got worse.
01:26In March of this year, the authorities switched off mobile internet across Moscow itself for
01:31nearly 21 straight days, with no real explanation offered to the millions of people who lived
01:36there.
01:36And Moscow is not a city you can simply unplug.
01:39When the signal died, ordinary life seized up.
01:42People couldn't pay with their cards, pull up a map to find an address, order a taxi from their phones,
01:47or in some cases, even get into a parking garage or a public toilet, because so much of the city's
01:53basic
01:53infrastructure now runs through an app.
01:56The security services had also all but blocked Telegram, one of the most widely used messaging
02:01platforms in the country, starting in April 2026.
02:05People can dodge the block with a virtual private network, but the state is moving to ban those
02:10too.
02:11In their place, the government has rolled out its own messaging application, a state-run
02:15platform called Max, now pre-installed on phones sold in Russia.
02:19But to make matters worse, it would only take a few weeks after that for the government to seemingly
02:24reverse course.
02:25The platform's fast launch meant it came out with a lack of security features, prompting the command
02:30to once again suggest Telegram for frontline forces.
02:33So why does this make Russia seem so weak?
02:36The answer is control over the narrative.
02:39For years, Putin had kept the war comfortably off stage with the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg,
02:44the very people whose contentment matters most to the stability of his regime.
02:48The shutdowns made the war and lack of stability front and centre in people's minds.
02:54Suddenly, the war was not a distant rumble on the evening news.
02:57Small businesses were literally losing money because they couldn't run online stores due
03:01to outages.
03:02Four years in, and the war had come home, and it had directly affected the daily routine
03:07of millions of people who had never been asked to think much about it at all.
03:11And those people started to talk.
03:13The criticism has been loud, public, and even unusually blunt for a country where speaking
03:19out carries real risk.
03:20A rapper performing under the name Pataka told his audience that the country was sliding
03:24back into the Stone Age, demanding to know whether the people dreaming up these policies
03:29had lost their minds.
03:30A retired KGB officer named Andrei Bezerukov, hardly a liberal dissident, offered a public
03:36rebuke of his own, warning that the state was now working against its own people and simply
03:41making their lives worse.
03:42And from Monaco, a Russian blogger named Victoria Bonia posted an 18-minute video aimed directly
03:48at Putin, in which he described a population that had been robbed of everything and was still
03:53being robbed, which immediately went viral in Russia.
03:56Importantly, there are no protests, at least not yet.
03:59But all of these events, combined with the fact that Russia is slowly but surely losing
04:04its grip on the real war figures and will inevitably have to fess up to its public, means that there's
04:09now a real risk of exactly that happening.
04:11The polling tells the same story in cold figures.
04:14In December 2025, the state-run pollster Vitsium found that about 78% of Russians said they trusted Putin.
04:22By April 2026, just five months later, that number had fallen to 65.6%, a drop of 12.2 percentage
04:30points
04:31that represented a low point for the entire wartime period.
04:34Now, you should always treat numbers from a state pollster with caution, because they're built to flatter the man in
04:39charge.
04:40But that's exactly what makes the drop so dangerous.
04:43When even the Kremlin's own pollster is publishing a decline like that, the real mood on the street is almost
04:48certainly worse.
04:50This is supported by the fact that an independent survey by the Levada Center, conducted in February,
04:55found that 67% of Russians believe the country should be moving toward peace negotiations.
05:01Two-thirds of the population are quietly telling the government that they want this to end.
05:05The discontent is also being fed by something the Kremlin can't disguise as easily as a foreign war, and that's
05:12the state of the Russian economy.
05:13For most of this conflict, Russia's economy defied the predictions of collapse.
05:18Sanctions came, and the economy adapted. Oil kept flowing to new buyers like India and China,
05:23and the famous shadow fleet that sold to countries under the guise of foreign flags.
05:28Military spending pumped money into factories and wages, and the war-driven boom covered the damage dealt to the economy
05:34through inflation.
05:34But that's slowly ending. Official data show that Russia's GDP shrank by 0.3% in the first three months
05:42of this year, the first such reduction since 2023.
05:46The Ministry of Economy quietly cut its own forecast for annual growth in 2026, slashing it from 1.3%
05:53down to just 0.4%.
05:55And independent analysts believe the real picture is considerably worse than officials are willing to admit.
06:00For some, Russia is likely entering a more difficult economic period for the simple reason that sustaining the war is
06:07becoming increasingly costly.
06:09Past one point, Ukraine's defenses just made direct infantry investment a waste of time, money and people.
06:15If we look past the headline figures, the civilian economy looks even more in distress.
06:20Business investment has collapsed to its lowest level since the pandemic, because no sane company commits capital to expansion when
06:27the future is this uncertain and boring this expensive.
06:30Manufacturing output outside the war industries is in steep contraction.
06:35Even then, Russia practically has no weapons exports, with the Jamestown Foundation suggesting that Russia lost over 90% of
06:43its exports.
06:44A more conservative analysis from March 2026 indicates that this loss is only 64% in five years between 2021
06:53and 2026.
06:55Even then, that's a huge amount of income lost.
06:58Then there are the banks, and they may be the most dangerous part of the whole picture.
07:03Russia's lenders are wrestling with a rising tide of bad business debt, loans that won't be repaid because the borrowers
07:09can no longer pay.
07:10In April, rumors tore through the country that the government was preparing to freeze or even confiscate ordinary citizens' bank
07:18deposits.
07:18A fleet of large telegram channels published what they claimed were leaked central bank documents proving it.
07:24Those particular documents were almost certainly fakes, but they managed to trigger a panic, and that was enough.
07:31This kind of jitteriness leaves the entire system more vulnerable to a bank run.
07:35In a healthy economy, a fake rumor dies quietly.
07:38In a frightened one, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
07:41And now we come to the leaked documents, the ones that triggered this whole conversation.
07:46In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put numbers to all of this in a way that's not been done before.
07:52In a statement on Telegram, he claimed that Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service had obtained internal Russian documents,
07:59an honest internal assessment of the country's wartime losses that Moscow was trying to hide from the world and from
08:05its own citizens alike.
08:06Now, it's worth being clear about what these documents are and are not.
08:10They are claims relayed by the Ukrainian President, citing his own intelligence service, and the underlying documents have not been
08:16made public.
08:17That's a different and lower tier of evidence than the figures we've been discussing from named Western institutions.
08:23So treat what follows as Ukraine's account, not as an independently confirmed fact.
08:28But all of it lines up uncomfortably well with everything the open data already shows.
08:33According to Zelensky, the first major indicator in those documents was the shutdown of active oil wells.
08:40He said that one Russian oil company had already been forced to suspend operations at around 400 wells.
08:46That matters because of the peculiar nature of Russian oil.
08:49Restarting a well that's been shut is far harder in Russia than in many other oil producing countries,
08:55mostly due to the geology and the techniques involved.
08:58A well that goes quiet doesn't simply switch back on when prices recover.
09:02So these were, in Zelensky's framing, significant and lasting losses rather than a temporary pause.
09:09The second indicator was a drop in refining.
09:11Russian oil refining volumes, he claimed, had fallen by at least 10% over the first several months of this
09:17year.
09:17A decline he tied directly to Ukraine's campaign of long-range strikes against Russian energy infrastructure.
09:24Then we come back to the banks.
09:26The leaked assessment described 11 Russian financial institutions preparing for liquidation,
09:31with another 8 carrying critical problems that wouldn't be solvable without outside resources.
09:37Again, these are Ukrainian intelligence claims.
09:40But set them beside the Russian government's own admission of contraction,
09:43beside the double deficit measured by independent economists,
09:47beside the bad debt crisis Western analysts have described for months,
09:50and the leaked picture stops looking like wishful propaganda
09:53and starts looking like a darker version of a story everyone can already see.
09:58The oil weakness is especially revealing, because by all accounts,
10:012026 should have been an excellent year for Russian energy revenue.
10:05The war in Iran sent global oil prices soaring,
10:08climbing by over 50% in just three months between February and May.
10:12And that price spike was so disruptive to world markets
10:15that the United States actually waived sanctions on Russian oil exports to keep the crude flowing.
10:21Putin should have been swimming in money,
10:23and for a moment he was.
10:24In March, Russia's oil export revenue practically doubled from the same month last year,
10:29and was the highest monthly total since 2023.
10:33But this won't be enough.
10:35But before we get into why, make sure you're subscribed to The Military Show,
10:39so you don't miss any news on global geopolitics.
10:42We post daily videos detailing recent events,
10:45major turnabouts, and vital information you need to know.
10:48Back to Russia's seeming oil crisis.
10:50A big part of that is that Ukraine's strikes on refineries and energy infrastructure
10:55have curbed any attempt at an economic windfall by directly reducing how much oil Russia can produce and export.
11:02By early April 2026, Russia's oil exports had dropped to 3.5 million barrels a day,
11:08down from an average of 5.2 million in the period before, according to an analysis by Carnegie Endowment.
11:14Over the course of two weeks, that's about 30 million barrels in foreign sales carved away precisely when prices were
11:21at their highest.
11:22Even last year, Ukraine struck at least 21 of Russia's 38 refineries, causing fuel shortages, price rises, and long lines
11:29at petrol stations.
11:31And the campaign is intensifying, thanks in no small part to the fact that Ukraine has developed long-range drones
11:37to strike deeper into Russia's territory than ever before.
11:41One night in mid-May, Ukraine launched 600 long-range drones at Moscow in one of the largest such attacks
11:47of the entire war,
11:48with many penetrating the capital's defenses and striking its largest refinery for the first time.
11:53While the economy buckles, the picture on the battlefield has quietly turned as well,
11:58and this may be the development that frightens the Kremlin most, because it strikes directly at the source of Putin's
12:03authority.
12:04In December 2025, Russia was ambling forward, claiming nearly seven square miles of Ukrainian territory every single day,
12:12according to the Institute for the Study of War.
12:14Then the advances began to slow.
12:17By February 2026, for the first time since July 2023, the advantage marker reversed as Ukraine started making net territorial
12:25gains.
12:26The reason is not simply courage or luck.
12:29It's technology, and an industrial base learning to innovate at terrifying speed.
12:34Ukraine's newest drones have expanded the kill zone,
12:36the deadly stretch of ground that attacking troops must cross before they can take and hold territory.
12:41That zone is now so lethal that Russian forces can no longer amass into the large assault groups of 13
12:47men that once overwhelmed Ukrainian lines.
12:50They're forced instead to creep forward in tiny teams of two or three.
12:54Robert Brovdy, the commander of Ukraine's unmanned systems forces, suggested that although drones make up 2% of Ukraine's military,
13:02they account for a third of all the targets it destroys.
13:05And remember, there are long-range strikes to account for,
13:08where Ukraine is steadily attacking infrastructure more than 60 miles behind the front.
13:13But how did it come to this?
13:14The ongoing war of attrition was technically supposed to be Russia's to win.
13:18On the brutal logic, they had more men to throw into the grinder than Ukraine.
13:22But the arithmetic has finally caught up.
13:25Data since December of 2025 suggests that Russia's casualties now exceed the number of recruits it can get.
13:31The Economist has calculated that roughly 3% of Russia's entire male population of fighting age has been killed or
13:38wounded in this war by mid-2026.
13:41Putin had previously avoided the political nightmare of a full mobilization by buying his soldiers instead.
13:48The state dangled signing bonuses and salaries that were too large to refuse for men in poorer regions,
13:54at some point reaching more than the average annual salary in Russia.
13:57But that pool is starting to run out, and Russia has been forced to find recruits elsewhere.
14:02Remember the 11,000 North Korean troops who were sent to fight for Russia and were written about in late
14:082024?
14:08That was apparently just the start, as Russia managed to get 1,700 recruits from African countries, including Zimbabwe and
14:16Kenya.
14:17But ultimately, those numbers are a drop in the ocean, compared to what Russia needs in terms of manpower.
14:23So the Kremlin is reaching for backdoor measures.
14:26In October 2025, Putin amended a federal law so that reservists can be called up even under the fiction that
14:33it's not a war but a special military operation.
14:35And the state has begun pressing its own companies into service as recruiters, handing them quotas of soldiers to deliver.
14:43In January 2026, the state changed its conscription to year-round, meaning that men could be called up at any
14:50point if they need to serve,
14:51and the bonuses have been climbing steadily all the while.
14:54Every one of those options pours more pain back into a drowning economy,
14:58because every man sent to the front is a worker pulled out of a labor market that's already desperately short
15:04of hands.
15:05If you want a single image that captures how far this is gone, look at the Red Square at the
15:09Victory Day parade in 2026.
15:12For Putin, that parade is sacred political theater.
15:15It's built to intimidate, to display Russia as a great military power, and to wrap the current war in the
15:21glory of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.
15:24This year was a shadow of that. Short on heavy equipment and in constant fear that the Ukrainians might strike
15:30the event itself,
15:31all the equipment that would have actually been paraded on the streets was instead shown on television screens.
15:37Foreign leaders were conspicuously absent, including China's Xi Jinping.
15:41Most humiliating of all, the parade could only go ahead after the United States brokered a three-day ceasefire,
15:47with Zelensky jokingly announcing that he would permit the holding of a parade.
15:52And Putin's failures on the battlefield are now drawing fire from an unexpected direction.
15:57The pro-war camp in Russia, from the very hardliners who wanted him to fight harder.
16:02Abbas Galimov, who once wrote speeches for Putin and is now an opposition figure abroad,
16:07told the Wall Street Journal that the turning point came in January,
16:11the month when the war in Ukraine finally lasted longer than the Soviet Union's entire war against Nazi Germany.
16:17When even the people who want more war are mocking your competence, you're in a dangerous place, and Putin appears
16:24to feel it.
16:24The Kremlin is now busy staging more propaganda, showing Putin meeting various people outdoors in regular clothing
16:31and surrounded not by servicemen, but by regular people.
16:35The entire show is a facade, meant to dissuade any claims that Putin has been hiding in bunkers
16:40when he's not photographed making self-important speeches.
16:43All of this is now bleeding into the question of how and whether the war ends.
16:48The American-led negotiations that were supposed to happen last year stalled after President Donald Trump took office.
16:55After months of little progress, the US formally withdrew from the negotiations,
16:58leaving Ukraine and the rest of Europe on one side and Russia on the other.
17:03In early 2026, Trump was consumed by the war in Iran, and having cut off funding to Ukraine,
17:10he'd also lost much of his leverage over Kyiv.
17:12But even without support from the world's largest military, Ukraine is seemingly thriving.
17:17The rest of Europe picked up the slack and started sending more equipment and aid,
17:21forming the coalition of the willing to discuss the future of the war,
17:24up to possibly even directly intervening with their own troops.
17:28Putin himself also cryptically suggested that the war might be coming to an end shortly after the victory parade.
17:34But then he again stated that he was the wronged party, suggesting that he would meet Zelensky when Ukraine agreed
17:41to a lasting peace.
17:42Based on previous announcements, this falls in line with Russia trying to extract as much as possible from Ukraine for
17:49providing no guarantees.
17:50There's also a darker possibility hanging over everything we've discussed.
17:54The internet shutdowns, the crackdown, the growing influence of the FSB,
17:59all of it points towards a regime preparing to extract still more from its exhausted population by force.
18:05Russia could be laying the groundwork to crush any resistance to the harsher measures the war will demand.
18:10And it points to a chilling precedent.
18:12In January, Russia's ally Iran imposed a nationwide internet shutdown and used the resulting darkness as cover for a massacre
18:20that reportedly killed as many as over 30,000 civilians.
18:24Thus, the only real question is how far Putin is willing to go to hold on to power.
18:29But even that might not be enough.
18:31If you want to learn more about how the Kremlin feels about Putin, check out this video.
18:36Then, make sure to subscribe to The Military Show for more news on global geopolitics.
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