Putin's Popularity Runs Out of Gas: Rating Posts Steepest Wartime Drop

A dictator can survive a lot of things. He can survive a war that has curdled into stalemate. He can survive the coffins. What he apparently cannot survive is making a Russian sit in a petrol queue for the better part of a day.

Start with the number, because the number is the story. The Kremlin-linked Public Opinion Foundation recorded a five-percentage-point drop in Putin's approval over a single week, pushing it to 66 percent, the steepest weekly decline since the start of Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine.¹ That five-point plunge, measured between July 10 and 12, matches the fall of autumn 2022, when Putin announced partial mobilization after battlefield setbacks.² The state's other pollster, VTsIOM, tells the same tale from a different angle: its approval figure sank to 65.1 percent, the lowest of the entire war, with the four-week decline outpacing both the 2022 mobilization slump and the 2024 Kursk incursion.³

What cracked the ice? Not conscience. Fuel. For a second consecutive week, Russians named fuel shortages, not the war, as the country's single biggest problem: 19 percent cited the gas crunch, 18 percent the war in Ukraine, 14 percent the attacks on Russian soil.⁴ Sit with that ranking. The invasion Putin sold as a patriotic crusade now polls below the inconvenience of an empty tank.

The scale is not subtle. By early July, fuel shortages, rationing, or restrictions were reported in nearly all of Russia's 83 federal regions, and by Meduza's count every one of the country's largest refineries had been struck, most recently the Soviet-era behemoth in Omsk, 1,200 miles from the front. It was the last one left.⁵ In occupied Crimea it is uglier still: the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol told Putin in a public meeting that premium gasoline had hit 197 rubles a liter, more than double the national average and triple pre-war prices.⁶

And how does the man in the Kremlin respond to a supply catastrophe his own war manufactured? He goes hunting for scapegoats. On July 6, Russia's competition ministry opened formal cases against six independent gas station operators in the Moscow region and three in Orenburg for "simultaneously" raising prices on fuel they were struggling to source in the first place.⁷ Blame the corner store for the fire you set. Meanwhile Putin dismissed the strikes as a Ukrainian "information campaign" and reframed the scarcity as a psychological problem to be resisted mentally rather than a policy failure to be fixed.⁸ Can't buy gas? Comrade, that's a mindset issue.

Here is the grift beneath the propaganda. The only real fix Putin has offered is a law letting producers stretch supplies by blending lower-grade Euro-3 gasoline, which carries fifteen times the sulfur of the current standard and does serious damage to modern car engines.⁹ The state that cannot fuel your car will happily wreck its motor. And rather than reconsider the war, Moscow is reportedly weighing whether the crisis gives it a pretext to invoke nationwide "heightened readiness," a state-of-emergency mechanism last used during COVID, while another rumor holds that September's State Duma elections might be postponed.¹⁰ Every lever points one direction: more control from above, never a concession from below.

Now the vise from outside. A bipartisan Senate group released the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, imposing mandatory sanctions on Putin, senior Russian leaders, oligarchs, and state enterprises, and authorizing tariffs up to 100 percent on the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas: China, India, Slovakia, Hungary, and Azerbaijan.¹¹ A White House official said on July 13 that Trump plans to back the bill, a move that would intensify pressure on the Kremlin.¹² Oil and the energy sector fund roughly a third of Russia's budget. Squeeze the barrel and you squeeze the war.

Don't mistake a sliding poll for a falling regime. The state pollster still says two Russians in three approve of the man, and analysts warn the anger is corrosive, not explosive. But the abstraction is gone. The war Putin promised would happen to other people, somewhere else, now idles in a gas line outside Moscow with a crying driver asking what he did to deserve this. He voted for it. MUCK YOU!