Pressure From Within: Public Anger as a Weapon in Russia's Ongoing Elite Conflict

Executive Summary

The conflict between Russia’s Presidential Administration (PA) and the security services bloc — in which the PA is deliberately amplifying public discontent through loyal bloggers and ratings manipulation — in all likelihood extends beyond a bureaucratic pre-election power struggle and reflects a deeper dispute over the country’s strategic direction: between further escalating the war, including beyond Ukraine, and effectively accepting defeat in Ukraine under the propagandistic cover of “a great victory”. While the strategic dimension of this conflict remains an analytical inference drawn from domestic, regional, and international politics, the confrontation between the PA and the FSB, as well as the associated campaigns, can be treated as established fact.

In recent weeks, the tensions within Russia’s state apparatus have come into sharp relief. While the Presidential Administration (PA) is focused on containing rising public discontent, the FSB has been aggressively expanding its control over the Russian internet segment, subordinating it to its own interests. The primary driver of the blocking agenda is the FSB’s Second Service “for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Counter-terrorism” — the main repressive structure responsible for domestic politics, ideological control, countering the opposition, and political assassinations. According to the independent media outlets (1), in mid-2025 Vladimir Putin met with Alexei Sedov, head of the Second Service, at which telecommunications, IT and internet oversight were transferred from technical subdivisions to his service, which was effectively given carte blanche over further decisions concerning Runet (Russian internet) — these decisions no longer require sign-off from domestic-policy overseers or any further political oversight.

The bureaucratic conflict between the civilian power vertical and the security services has deepened the public crisis, whose demonstrative character is being deliberately amplified by PA political technologists. Their aim — through the striking picture of the current public crisis, constructed via coordinated campaigns and manipulation of published polling data — is to freeze or even roll back the security services’ unpopular internet-blocking decisions by framing them as a threat not only to the ruling party’s electoral ratings but to Vladimir Putin personally and to his regime as a whole. From a domestic-politics standpoint, halting these decisions would allow the PA to avoid a complete transfer of domestic policy to security-service control, run the State Duma election campaign in a more manageable and less costly format, and strengthen its own position in the ongoing conflict with the security bloc — which has assumed a central role in Russia’s power vertical over the course of the war. On questions of domestic and foreign policy, according to EK Stratcom sources, the confrontation may concern the country’s overall strategic direction: a choice between further escalation of the war, including beyond Ukraine, and an unfavorable but face-saving peace.

The conflict between officials and the security services is signalled directly by a campaign of discontent among bloggers and influencers who are publicly loyal to the authorities. The most prominent episode is a video address (2) posted on 14 April on Russia-banned Instagram by popular lifestyle blogger Viktoria Bonia: the video attracted 18 million views within its first day online. Addressing Vladimir Putin directly — “There is much you do not know, <…> you are being lied to” — she criticised a wide range of issues, from digital restrictions to environmental problems, rising prices, and tighter fiscal policy.

On one reading, the Kremlin’s public response (3)(4) to the critical posts — from Putin’s press secretary Peskov, among others — could be explained by the public resonance around Bonia’s video. On the other hand, the Kremlin never comments on anything it does not wish to comment on, regardless of the level of public interest — still less when the subject is a glamour blogger. The Kremlin’s public response signals a desire to draw attention to Bonia’s video, not deflect it through silence.

In pursuit of the same goals, the PA’s domestic-politics directorate has recently been openly manipulating the weekly coordinated approval ratings published by the Administration-controlled polling agencies — the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) and the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) — alternating between sharp drops and modest partial recoveries. According to their data, the presidential job-approval rating has fallen by 12.17 percentage points since the start of the year, and the level of trust in Putin by 8.99 percentage points. This is entirely inconsistent with the more credible data from the independent Levada Centre, which records a decline of only 5 pp (10) since December 2025.