President of Russia. He is 72 years old. He came to power through a behind-the-scenes transfer from Boris Yeltsin in 1999. He has gone to war five times in 25 years. He celebrates Victory Day on May 9th in Red Square, marking the defeat of Nazi Germany.
What began as a "special military operation" in Ukraine has become, in his framing, Russia's existential struggle against the West. As the death toll has grown, his war aims have swollen to justify Russian losses. He uses the war as his excuse for ever-harsher repression and isolation from the West. He has put the whole of Russian society onto a war footing.
Putin believes the Afghan war was one of the main reasons the Soviet Union collapsed. To avoid that fate he has devised what analysts call "market mobilisation" or "deathonomics": lavish contracts that offer life-changing sums to volunteers from provincial Russia rather than ordering full mobilisation. The system amounts to an implicit contract not just between the soldier and the state but also wider society, which accepts it as an alternative to conscription.
Over six weeks in early 2026, VCIOM, the state pollster, found Putin's approval rating fell eight percentage points to 66%, the lowest since the war began. Confidence that things are moving in the right direction fell 20 percentage points since the start of the year, to 41%. The levels of VCIOM's ratings may not be reliable, but the trend probably is; the civilian administration, which controls the pollster, sometimes releases such data to communicate criticism of the security services.
Before the war, 60% of Russians said the government's priority should be to raise living standards. That share has since fallen to 41%; 55% now say they want Russia to be respected as a world power. As of early 2026, some 60% of Russians expect this year to be harder than last. Diagnosed cases of anxiety and depression rose 21% from 2020 to 2024; prescriptions of antidepressants were up 18% year on year in January 2026. Pollsters routinely find that the vast majority of Russians want the war to end; in December 2025 a majority told Levada that they paid little or no attention to how the war was progressing.
The perception of support for the war has shifted markedly. In May 2023 Russians thought by 57% to 39% that most in their inner circle supported the war. By October 2025 they thought by 55% to 45% that those in their inner circle mostly opposed it or were evenly divided. War zealots never exceeded 25% of the population, nor did active opponents. A Levada poll found only 40% of Russians see veterans as heroes; the majority see them as threatening, or as victims. In an experiment, 88% of respondents said they wished for the war to end; only 47% expected Putin to achieve that. The number saying their well-being was deteriorating was triple those saying it was improving—the highest level since the start of the war.
Putin courted Venezuela from the outset of his presidency in 2000, selling it weapons, offering multi-billion-dollar credit lines and investing heavily in its oilfields. He believed Venezuela was an asset that could be traded in the geopolitical game. Fiona Hill, a former American national-security official, testified in 2019 that during Trump's first term Russia had offered to drop its support for Venezuela if America gave it a free hand in Ukraine. Yet when American forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, Putin said nothing publicly, delegating criticism of American "aggression" to his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. American forces easily knocked out Venezuela's Russian-built air defences.
Putin has repeatedly failed to defend strategic partners: he watched as Bashar Assad was overthrown in Syria in 2024, and stood by while America bombed Iran. The contrast between America's swift operation in Venezuela and Russia's stalled "special military operation" in Ukraine was not lost on Russia's military bloggers.
Through the war, Putin has deepened Russia's ties to China, Iran and North Korea. On September 3rd 2025 he attended China's military parade in Beijing, displaying the strengthening of military ties between the two countries. America's envoy Steve Witkoff has said that Putin can be trusted.
At the May 9th 2025 Victory Day parade Putin boasted that Russia-China strategic co-operation was built on the "unshakeable principle of equality". In reality, Russia is more dependent on China now than at any time in its history. China accounted for 34% of Russia's total trade in 2024; Russia made up just 4% of China's. Western sanctions have left Russia with few alternative buyers for its raw materials and no real alternative supplier of imported goods. The Chinese yuan overtook the dollar on the Moscow Exchange in 2023 and Russia's central bank said it had no real alternative to the yuan for its reserves. Many Russians still see China like a younger brother: according to a recent poll, twice as many (56%) believe their country has greater influence in the world than those who think China has (27%). But the number of people who feel the relationship is improving has fallen from 63% to 50% over the past two years.
Putin could reduce reliance on China by improving relations with America, where the Trump administration has been friendlier than its predecessor. But Xi Jinping is keen to keep Russia where it is.
Putin has spurned Trump's pleas to stop fighting in Ukraine, instead proposing a "comprehensive" deal that addresses all his grievances at once. Trump has preferred to talk up "land swaps"—code for Ukraine surrendering territory of such value that Putin might be induced to settle. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister who co-chaired the 1995 Dayton peace talks on Bosnia, has argued that Putin's demands for territory conceal a larger goal: to prevent Ukraine from thriving as a state that is at once Slavic, democratic and Western. Bildt distrusts Putin's insistence on tackling all disputes simultaneously, arguing that a sincere peace drive would start with a ceasefire, allowing step-by-step work on electricity supplies, prisoners of war, abducted Ukrainian children and sanctions.
Putin has presided over a wave of asset seizures that expanded from foreign firms leaving Russia to Russian-owned businesses. Since the start of the war more than 500 firms have been expropriated. Igor Krasnov, the prosecutor-general, boasted to Putin that he had recovered 2.4trn roubles "for the benefit of the state"; Putin then appointed him chief justice of Russia's Supreme Court. Putin also approved a decree granting soldiers immunity from prosecution while in service for relatively serious crimes, including theft and battery. According to a former senior Russian official, in the past three years assets worth around 5trn roubles ($60bn) have been seized from private businessmen and either nationalised or handed to loyalists and cronies—the largest redistribution of property since the mass privatisation of the 1990s.
On November 9th 2022 Putin signed his first purely ideological document—an executive order directed at strengthening "traditional Russian spiritual and moral values". It rejected "destructive ideology" such as "fostering of egoism, permissiveness and immorality, rejection of the ideals of patriotism, service to the Fatherland…and the values of a strong family". In April 2025 Alexander Kharichev, Putin's ideologist in the presidential administration, published a manifesto describing Russia not as a country or nation but as a unique "state-civilisation", unconstrained by any borders, that opposes Western individualism and "the cult of consumerism" with the idea of sacrificial devotion. Putin has said Russia projects power not only through its army and navy but through "many forms of art", which transmit the "civilisational code". He personally approved the prosecution of theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, who were convicted in 2024 of "propaganda and justification of terrorism" for a play about Russian women recruited by Islamic State—the first artists jailed for the content of their work since Soviet times.
Putin famously does not use the internet. In March 2026 he sanctioned the blocking of Telegram, which has a monthly reach of 94m people in Russia, seeing it as a hostile communication tool. He also approved FSB-ordered mobile-internet blackouts in Moscow and St Petersburg that lasted almost three weeks, part of a broader project to disconnect Russia from the global internet. See Russia: internet control.
Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Putin's early spin doctors, helped engineer the smooth transition from Boris Yeltsin to Putin. Pavlovsky's focus groups found that Russians' ideal leader resembled Max Otto von Stierlitz, the codename of a fictional Soviet-era superspy. Putin swiftly learned to play the part of an ex-spook who projected strength but was on the side of the people. His handlers strained to prevent him from being associated with failure of any kind—which is why Putin never went near the scene of the Kursk tragedy in 2000, in which a Russian submarine foundered and 118 sailors died. Gradually they built a myth of an all-powerful decider, promoting the old monarchical idea that injustice cannot be the good tsar's fault: it must be his bad officials'.
Despite dominating the means of persuasion, the Kremlin still needs to bribe or coerce people to attend rallies. When pranksome dissidents in a Siberian city advertised a "pro-Putin" event with no cash handouts and no state-owned firms forcing staff to go, only half a dozen people showed up.
During the covid-19 pandemic Putin isolated himself in his bunker and wrote an eccentric screed citing a 9th-century Viking warlord to explain why he needs to rule Ukraine.
In late August 2025 Putin met Trump at the American base in Anchorage. He conceded nothing, not even a ceasefire, and Russia spun the meeting as a great victory.
Oh, love is real enough, you will find it some day, but it has one arch-enemy -- and that is life.