Russians REBEL Against Putin: Moscow Streets Brink of Chaos as Putin Triggers New Mobilization
MOSCOW — In a video that spread rapidly across Russian social media this spring, a group of women in the Samara region stood in front of a camera and said something almost never spoken aloud in Russia: that Vladimir Putin himself should resign. “They are sending us to garages filled with gasoline and cars. They’re shoving us into these basements,” one woman said, referring to inadequate bomb shelters. “I am deeply convinced that everyone, starting from the president, must be removed from office.” Another told Putin directly to go live in the basement himself.
The footage, filmed without disguise and shared openly rather than through anonymous accounts, marked a rare breach of a boundary Russian state media has spent nearly four years reinforcing: that criticism of the war stays abstract, and criticism of Putin personally stays silent. Four years into the invasion of Ukraine, that boundary is showing real cracks — not from an organized opposition movement, which barely exists inside Russia anymore, but from something harder for the Kremlin to suppress: grieving mothers, exhausted workers, and a population increasingly convinced that the war’s costs are no longer temporary.
A Regime Increasingly Ruled by Fear of Its Own People
The anger has a specific, recurring source: soldiers’ mothers, many of whom have taken to filming themselves confronting the government directly over unpaid death benefits and unexplained casualties. “You’re killing our boys,” one woman says in footage that has circulated widely. “We can’t even get funeral expenses.” Analysts who track Russian domestic politics note that this constituency is uniquely difficult for the state to silence through the usual tools of intimidation, since prosecuting or threatening grieving mothers publicly would only accelerate the reputational damage the Kremlin is trying to contain.
Compounding the anger is what Ukrainian and independent Russian sources describe as a covert, undeclared mobilization effort — recruitment drives that stop short of a formal decree but rely on aggressive, sometimes coercive tactics to fill manpower quotas. Videos have circulated showing men being stopped in public, told they resemble a wanted suspect on a search warrant, and pressured or physically compelled into signing “volunteer” military contracts on the spot — a practice reportedly documented across more than two dozen Russian regions, including instances in Moscow itself. The tactic appears designed to avoid the domestic backlash a formal mobilization order would trigger, though critics argue it generates a different, more corrosive form of anger: the sense of being seized off the street with no due process at all.
An Institution Ruling Through Fear
That anxiety extends well beyond ordinary citizens. According to Bloomberg reporting from early August, Putin has increasingly empowered the FSB’s Second Service — the internal security directorate historically tasked with counterintelligence — with what sources close to the Kremlin described as effectively unlimited authority to investigate almost anyone in the country, including members of the business and political elite, with little meaningful oversight. Bloomberg’s sourcing pointed to the terrorism charges brought against Telegram founder Pavel Durov as one visible sign of the shift, and described a broader recalibration in which hardline security officials have gained influence at the expense of figures more focused on economic management, such as Kremlin domestic policy chief Sergei Kiriyenko. The effect, according to people familiar with elite sentiment described in that reporting, has been a growing sense among wealthy and politically connected Russians that no one is fully insulated from the security services’ reach — a dynamic that breeds compliance through fear rather than loyalty through conviction.
That fear appears to run in both directions. According to The Economist, citing sources close to the Kremlin, Putin has told associates in private that his greatest fear is not political defeat but physical retribution — reportedly telling confidants that failing to win the war could mean Russians “will hang me.” Consistent with that account, Putin’s presidential security detail, the FSO, has reportedly been expanded to record levels for the fourth time since the war began, and the Financial Times has reported that the Kremlin now formally assesses the risk of an assassination attempt or drone strike against Putin as high, prompting sharply reduced travel and heightened security protocols around him, including a phone ban imposed on close staff.
The Mobilization Trap
At the center of the tension is a decision Putin has so far avoided: whether to declare a large-scale, formal mobilization to address a manpower shortfall that Ukrainian officials say has left Russian battlefield losses outpacing new recruitment for five consecutive months. Ukrainian intelligence has assessed that Russia is preparing a mobilization drive of as many as 600,000 people to follow parliamentary elections scheduled for September 18-20, with some estimates suggesting the true figure could approach half a million to 600,000 additional troops, some of whom could be pushed toward the front within weeks of being called up. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has separately warned that the coming months could bring a serious escalation in Russian mobilization efforts, framing it as a signal the alliance needs to take seriously.
The risk calculus facing the Kremlin is stark, according to Sergei Zhirnov, a former Soviet intelligence officer who has argued publicly that a new mobilization wave could trigger a genuine revolutionary crisis. Zhirnov’s argument rests on a specific distinction: the war so far has relied heavily on paid contract soldiers — people who, whatever their motivations, chose to fight for money — which he argues has insulated the broader population from the kind of direct, involuntary sacrifice that historically fuels unrest. A mass, compulsory callup would reverse that insulation overnight, conscripting people who explicitly do not want to fight and arming them in the process — a combination Zhirnov and other analysts have compared to the conditions that produced Yevgeny Prigozhin’s brief armed march toward Moscow in 2023, widely seen as one of the most serious internal threats to Putin’s rule to date.
Russian officials appear to have learned something concrete from the 2022 mobilization, when roughly 450,000 people were called up and the resulting public backlash — including a wave of hundreds of thousands fleeing the country — forced the Kremlin to quietly halt further callups. Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, has pointed to that episode as evidence the Kremlin knows precisely where the domestic breaking point lies. The concern among analysts is that Russian society today, after four additional years of war, economic strain and casualties, has far less capacity to absorb a repeat of that shock without a more severe reaction.
The Economic Backdrop
Feeding the unrest is a steadily eroding economic picture. Independent Russian economic commentary circulating widely online this year calculated that official inflation between the start of 2022 and April 2026 totaled nearly 44 percent, meaning a salary of 100,000 rubles today carries the purchasing power of roughly 56,000 rubles four years ago — a gap public-sector wages have not come close to closing. Estonia’s foreign intelligence chief, Kaupo Rosin, told The Telegraph that Russia’s economic and strategic position has deteriorated to the point that Putin now faces “only bad options,” while polling from Russia’s own state-linked VTsIOM agency has shown Putin’s approval rating sliding to some of its lowest levels since the war began, with independent pollsters suggesting the real erosion in public confidence may run deeper than survey data can fully capture in an authoritarian environment where respondents remain wary of voicing dissent.
An Uncertain Reckoning
None of this points to an imminent collapse of Putin’s government. Russia’s security services remain well resourced and increasingly empowered specifically to prevent organized dissent from coalescing, and history offers no shortage of examples of authoritarian systems absorbing sustained public anger without breaking. But the pattern emerging from soldiers’ mothers demanding accountability on camera, business elites reportedly uneasy with an empowered and unaccountable security apparatus, and a mobilization decision the Kremlin has visibly delayed rather than resolved, suggests a government increasingly managing its own population as carefully, and as anxiously, as it manages the war itself. Whether that anxiety remains contained to muttered discontent and viral videos, or eventually forces a reckoning the Kremlin cannot postpone past this month’s elections, is a question even officials close to Putin, by multiple accounts, no longer claim to have a confident answer to.
