Russia’s Supreme Court decision to remove the only registered party openly campaigning for peace, Yabloko, from the ballot for September’s State Duma election has revived the question of how many Russians oppose the Kremlin’s war and how much space remains to express that opposition.
It is certainly a signal of the regime’s resolve. After all, if a Western-style liberalism presents no threat to Putin’s despotic system, why ban opponents?
The answer may be found, in part, in events online and particularly among young people. Within a week of registering for the elections, Yabloko attracted a sudden wave of attention on social media, doubling its key social media metrics, which made it highly likely to exceed 5% support, a level sufficient to clear the electoral threshold and secure seats in parliament.
Young people made up the bulk of Yabloko’s new supporters and have used imaginative methods to express their discontent. Following the court ruling, dozens organized a protest in the form of a queue at the entrance of the court, and 80 were arrested. As CEPA has previously highlighted in a report on Russian civil society, in-country dissent now survives mainly through formally legal, low-risk forms of action such as queues and petitions.
Young Russians usually express their opposition outside organized politics, often in innovative, brief, and ambiguous forms. Others are more direct; in late July, the Russian actor Alexei Yarmushchik posted a video on Instagram addressing Putin directly. He said he didn’t want Putin as his president and didn’t accept that “Crimea is ours,” the 2014-era slogan that hardened into a loyalty test.
Like the video recorded in the spring by the television celebrity Victoria Bonya, which drew reactions at several levels of government, and like others that followed, Yarmushchik’s clip went viral and passed a million views within a day.
The two cases differ in more than reach. Bonya, 46, is a household name with a huge following and has long lived abroad, while Yarmushchik is a 26-year-old Moscow actor with a much smaller audience. More importantly, he belongs to Gen Z — a generation born between 1997 and 2012 that has never known another Russian leader.
Within hours, he posted again, saying he “respects Vladimir Putin” and was grateful that his statement had pushed him “out of his information bubble” and introduced him to Putin supporters who turned out to be “kind and polite.”
We can only speculate as to how Yarmushchik was helped to understand his error. But fear of prosecution will explain part of the reversal: repression now reaches the youngest Russians too, including long sentences on treason charges.
That’s not to say Russia’s young people are happy, because every believable measure of opinion says they’re not.
Since the full-scale invasion began, pollsters working without state involvement, and whose figures therefore deserve more trust, have recorded the same pattern: Russians under 30 view the war more negatively than the population as a whole. That’s perhaps unsurprising for a generation asked to sacrifice in Ukraine; with as many as 1.4 million dead and wounded, every young person will know a victim of Putin’s adventure and may fear they too will become a statistic.
Across three surveys, this anti-war sentiment is clear and growing over time, typically at around 15–20 percentage points (see figure below), widening aftershocks that hit younger Russians particularly hard, such as the 2022 mobilization, and remaining substantial even when pollsters use less direct measures of support for the war.
The Kremlin has responded with more patriotic education in schools and universities, while restricting platforms it can’t control, with the most recent example being the blocking of Telegram.
But the result is far from what the Kremlin desired. Now support for the war and Putin among the young is structurally frail, with space for mockery and a lingering gaze towards Western culture. Open opposition comes at a cost, as Yarmushchik learned within a day, so dissent takes less direct forms: careful, deniable, and often inventive. The examples below are small and hardly qualify as protest — which is precisely why they are revealing.
An example of this quieter, distinctly Gen Z resistance came at the June 12 Russia Day concert, packed with Kremlin-approved stars, including Shaman. One young attendee raised his phone during the climax of Rossiya-mama, not to film, but to play Brawl Stars – a joke derived from a Western Gen Z concert meme: holding up a game instead of recording the performer, a dismissive gesture hidden in plain sight. Her TikTok clip drew more than 200,000 likes.
The video reveals the ambiguity of patriotic support. Though able to laugh at Shaman’s expense, the original poster isn’t exactly a dissident. In her next video, she happily sang along to Tatiana Kurtukova, a de facto female counterpart to Shaman, declaring that “everyone’s a patriot for this song.” Clearly, everyone’s a patriot when they hear the right cue. And cues matter: in a recent study of how Russians consume news, it was found that many viewers, when cued by loaded terms (‘the West’, e.g.), simply repeated official talking points. This occasional “patriot” knew when and what to sing, but when something plainly funnier was put before her, she chose laughter.
An even better example can be found with the Instagram series Heterosexual Acquaintances. The street-interview channel asks young Muscovites simple, often absurd questions. In one video, people are asked whether they have any heterosexual acquaintances. Most instinctively say no, sometimes adding, “happily” or “I don’t associate with people like that.”
The reflex makes sense in context: Russia designated the so-called “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization in 2023, making anything associated with it politically and legally toxic. The interviewer follows up: “Really?” “Really.” “You sure?” “Yes.”
The joke lands when the word heterosexual is repeated, and the respondent finally understands. A grin or laugh follows, then a quick correction, often with the respondent playing along. The mere resemblance to homosexual is enough to trigger the expected response. In another video, the interviewer pauses just before the word heterosexual, and most people immediately understand the question.
But the grin is also where it ends. Most answer quickly or dodge the issue altogether. As one young man puts it: “In this game, there’s no winning for us.” Others turn official rhetoric into a joke, like the respondent who complains that, “unfortunately,” all his friends are heterosexual. They can mock the script and play with its language, but they know where the line is.
Seen together, these episodes of youth discontent suggest resistance among young Russians is better understood not as a choice between protest and compliance, but as a shifting repertoire of behavior.
Some people, like the recently exiled street musician Diana Loginova, will turn to open forms of demonstration, such as performing banned songs in the streets, and attract others to publicly sing along. Yet when people like Loginova are arrested and exiled, those massive crowds who joined in song don’t just evaporate; they instead employ subtler forms of expressing their discontent. CEPA’s report in June described a similar pattern in organized civic life: repression has not erased it, but pushed it into decentralized networks, low-risk actions, and less visible forms of solidarity.
Among younger Russians, the same logic appears at an everyday level — in jokes, coded language, selective participation, and deliberate irreverence. This does not resemble the opposition politics of an earlier Russia. That is precisely the point: under today’s conditions, resistance survives by becoming harder to see, classify, and suppress.
Ben Walsh is a recent intern with CEPA’s Democratic Resilience team and a graduate student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, obtaining a Master of Arts in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. His research interests include Russian political culture, democratization, tech policy, and the politics of the former Soviet Union. Ben has also worked as executive assistant to Georgetown’s Dissident-in-Residence, Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a political scientist and Russia expert focusing on elites, the bureaucracy, government data, and the policymaking process.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
